Organized Networks

studies in network cultures

Geert Lovink, Series Editor

This book series investigates concepts and practices special to network cultures. Exploring the spectrum of new media
and society, we see network cultures as a strategic term to enlist in diagnosing political and aesthetic developments in
user-driven communications. Network cultures can be understood as social-technical formations under construction.
They rapidly assemble, and can just as quickly disappear, creating a sense of spontaneity, transience and even
uncertainty. Yet they are here to stay. However self-evident it is, collaboration is a foundation of network cultures.
Working with others frequently brings about tensions that have no recourse to modern protocols of conflict resolution.
Networks are not parliaments. How to conduct research within such a shifting environment is a key interest to this
series.

The book series is a collaboration between the Institute of Network Cultures (inc) and NAi Publishers. The Institute
of Network Cultures was founded 2004 by its director Geert Lovink and is situated at the Amsterdam Polytechnic
(HvA), as a research program inside the School for Interactive Media. Since its inception the inc has organized
international conferences: A Decade of Web Design, Incommunicado: Information Technology for Everybody Else,
Urban Screens, The Art and Politics of Netporn and MyCreativity, a convention on creative industries research.

Series Coordinator: Sabine Niederer, Institute of Network Cultures.

For more information on the series please visit www.networkcultures.org/naiseries.
 Organized Networks
Media Theory,
Creative Labour,
New Institutions

Ned Rossiter

NAi Publishers
Institute of Network Cultures
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Contents

Acknowledgements 7

Introduction 13
Transdisciplinarity and the Legacy of Form 17
Informational Labour in the Creative Industries 24
Informational Universities and Neoliberalism as a Condition
of Possibility 28
Collaboration and Governance in New Institutional Forms 33
Institutions Beyond Democracy 37
Diagram of Thought 41

Part i
1 Whose Democracy? ngos, Information Societies and
Non-Representative Democracy 46
The Network Problematic 46
Networks and the Limits of Liberal Democracy 49
Multi-Stakeholderism and the Architecture of Net Politics 56
Scalar Tensions 60
Information Flows, Intellectual Property and Economic
Development 65

2 The World Summit on the Information Society and

Organized Networks as New Civil Society Movements 70
Global Governance and the World Summit on the Information
Society 78
Institutional Scale and the Technics of Governance 88
Part ii
3 Creative Industries, Comparative Media Theory
and the Limits of Critique from Within 98
Creative Industries, Intellectual Property Regimes
and the 'New Economy' 103
Post-Negativity and the Logic of Immanence 114
Comparative Media Theory and the Constitutive Outside 125

4 Creative Labour and the role of Intellectual Property 133

Reflexivity and Empirical Research 135
Creativity, What's in a Name? 138
Intellectual Property and Creativity 141
Intellectual Property and the Labour Contract 142
Intellectual Property and (Dis)Organized Labour 145
Multitudes and the Exploitation of Network Sociality 149
Immaterial or Disorganized Labour? 156

Part iii
5 Processual Media Theory 166
New Media Empirics 169
Processual Aesthetics as Radical Empiricism 173
Feedback Loops and Dissipative Structures 181
The Art of Day Trading 185
Towards a Politics of Processual Time 192

6 Virtuosity, Processual Democracy and Organized Networks 196

Virtuosity and Processual Democracy 200
Organized Networks 205
Translation, Transduction and Individuation 208

Notes 216
Bibliography 240
Acknowledgements

This book began as a PhD thesis, and I have Brian Shoesmith to thank
for his long-term support and patience. Sean Cubitt, Helen Grace and
McKenzie Wark examined that thesis, and their feedback has been most
helpful in revising the texts gathered here. My writing has benefited
from deadlines and audiences associated with many conferences, events
and seminar papers, and I thank all those who either invited me to un-
dertake some work or accepted my proposals. Much of this book has
been published in earlier versions. Thanks to the many who have done
editorial work on those texts, especially Jodi Dean, Chris Healy, Chris-
tiane Paul, editors at RealTime broadsheet as well as various journal and
conference reviewers. Two images from Michael Goldberg’s installation
catchingafallingknife.com appear in this book, and I appreciate his permis-
sion to use them here.
The University of Ulster has provided working conditions that en-
able writing and research to be undertaken. For their ongoing support
with funding and research, I thank Professor Máire Messenger Davies,
Director of the Centre for Media Research and Professor Bob Welch,
Dean of the Faculty of Arts. My colleagues at the Centre for Media Re-
search and School of Media and Performing Arts have made an impor-
tant difference to my life in Northern Ireland, especially Robert Porter,
Daniel Jewesbury, Paul Willemen and Valentina Vitali. Thanks also to
Paul Moore, Tony Langlois, Gail Baylis, Martin McLoone, Sarah Edge,
Amy Davis, Barbara Butcher and Vladan Zdravkovic. I thank Dan Flem-
ing for getting me to Northern Ireland in the first instance, even if he
did leave shortly afterwards.
This book has a long prehistory that I am certain tested the limits of
my dear friends: Robyn Barnacle, Brent Allpress, Pia Ednie-Brown, Gina
Moore, Gillian Warden, Daniel Palmer, Mike Hayes, Simon Cooper and
David Holmes. Over a period of many years Jody Berland, Allen Chun
and, more recently, Ien Ang and Sally Jane Norman have been particu-
larly supportive.

7
organized networks

Life in Europe and Australia has also been supported by the friend-
ship and intellectual feedback from Julian Kücklich, Maren Hartmann,
Katrien Jacobs, Dominic Pettman, Akseli Virtanen, Carlos Fernández,
Linda Wallace, Mieke Gerritzen, Renata Kokanovic, Grisha Dolgopolov,
Brian Holmes, Sandra Braman, Simon Busch and John Hutnyk. And life
in China wouldn’t be the same without the friendship of Du Ping.
These texts have benefited enormously from the critical feedback of
Fibreculture and Nettime mailing lists. In so many ways this book was
born on those lists, which have been a source of much inspiration and
learning. Fibreculture in particular provided, for the first time in my
life, a sense of material connection with broader intellectual and politi-
cal currents. Esther Milne, Andrew Murphie, Anna Munster, Lisa Gye,
David Teh, Chris Chesher, Gillian Fuller and Danny Butt have all taught
me a lot and been wonderful friends. Feedback and critique from Esther
and Andrew has been crucial in bringing this book to completion, and
I thank both enormously for their help. Esther provided an especially
close reading of the manuscript. Thanks also to respondents to the
Fibreculture survey discussed in chapter 4.
Much of this book was finished at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu
Berlin/Institute for Advanced Study in July 2006. I would like to thank
Christine von Arnim for making arrangements that made that stay pos-
sible. Conversations and martinis with Catherine David and Samah
Selim made all the difference.
Sabine Niederer at the Institute of Network Cultures has negotiated
this book through to publication, and I thank her for all her help.
Thanks to Barbera van Kooij at NAi Publishers for taking this book on,
and for guiding it through to print. D’Laine Camp did a fine job with
copy-editing and I thank her for the hard work and care she put into
this book.
This book is in so many respects a collaborative effort. This is partic-
ularly the case with the guiding political concept and project of organ-
ized networks. Geert Lovink, Brett Neilson and Soenke Zehle have been
immensely important friends and intellectual companions. I have a spe-
cial thanks for Geert who has been an intellectual mentor and support-
er of my work over the years. This book wouldn’t have happened with-
out him.

8
 acknowledgements

My father, Richard Rossiter, and mother, Miranda Hamilton, and

brothers Tom and Will have given me an incredible life and their love.
My dad has been particularly supportive throughout this long period of
research. He has also taught me how to read, how to teach and how to
keep the madness of university personas at a distance.

Ned Rossiter
October, 2006

Previous versions or parts of chapters in this book have been published

in other volumes, journals or magazines. I acknowledge the editors and
publishers for permission to bring these texts together in this book. All
chapters have been revised and developed for this book.

Part of the introduction to this book was published as ‘Organised Net-

works, Transdisciplinarity and New Institutional Forms’, Intelligent
Agent 6.2 (2006), http://www.intelligentagent.com/. The online news
feeds and text filtering sites Interactivist Info Exchange and Transform
also published parts of this introduction.

A much shorter version of chapter 1 was published as ‘Organized Net-

works and Non-Representative Democracy’, in Jodi Dean, Jon Anderson
and Geert Lovink (eds.), Reformatting Politics: Networked Communications
and Global Civil Society, London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Taylor
& Francis Group, Inc. The chapter also draws on material published on-
line for Dark Markets: Infopolitics, Electronic Media and Democracy in Times
of Crisis, International Conference by Public Netbase/t0, Muesumsplatz,
Vienna, 3-4 October, 2002, http://darkmarkets.t0.or.at/.

Chapter 2 was published as ‘wsis and Organised Networks as New Civil

Society Movements’, in Jan Servaes and Nico Carpentier (eds.), Beyond
the WSIS: Towards A Sustainable Agenda for the Future Information Society,
Bristol: Intellect Books, 2006, pp. 97-116; and ‘The World Summit on the
Information Society and Organised Networks as New Civil Society
Movements’, in Michael Fine, Nicholas Smith and Amanda Wise (eds),

9
organized networks

Mobile Boundaries/Rigid Worlds: Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Conference of

the crsi, Centre for Research on Social Inclusion, Macquarie University,
2005, http://www.crsi.mq.edu.au/mobileboundaries.htm.

Chapter 3 was published as ‘Creative Industries, Comparative Media

Theory, and the Limits of Critique from Within’, Topia: A Canadian Jour-
nal of Cultural Studies 11 (Spring, 2004): 21-48. A shorter version was
published as ‘Creative Industries and the Limits of Critique from With-
in’, M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 6.3 (2003), http://journal.media-
culture.org.au/0306/11-creativeindustries.php.

Chapter 4 was published as ‘Report: Creative Labour and the Role of In-
tellectual Property, Fibreculture Journal 1 (2003), http://journal.fibrecul-
ture.org/issue1/issue1_rossiter.html. A shorter version was published as
‘Creative Labour and the Role of Intellectual Property’, Noema: Technolo-
gie e Società 31 (2003),
http://www.noemalab.com/sections/ideas/ideas_articles/rossiter_
creative_labour.html.

Chapter 5 was published as ‘Processual Media Theory’, symploke 11.1/2

(2003): 104-131. University of Nebraska Press; ‘Processual Media Theo-
ry’, Fine Art Forum 17.8 (August, 2003),
http://www.fineartforum.org/Backissues/Vol_17/faf_v17_n08/reviews/r
ossiter.html; ‘Processual Media Theory’, in Adrian Miles (ed.), Streaming
Worlds: 5th International Digital Arts & Culture (dac) Conference, 19-23
May, 2003, Melbourne: rmit University, 2003, pp. 173-184, http://
hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/papers/Rossiter.pdf.

The chapter also draws on material published as ‘Processual Media The-

ory and the Art of Day Trading’, Noema: Technologie e Società 25 (2003),
http://www.noemalab.com/sections/ideas/ideas_25.html; ‘Review. Day
Trading Aesthetics: Playing with Murdoch’, RealTime 53 (February-
March, 2003), p. 25. Also available online:
http://www.realtimearts.net/rt53/rossiter.html; and ‘A Code in Search
of a Process’, RealTime, OnScreen 47 (February-March, 2002), p. 22. Also
available online: http://www.realtimearts.net/rt47/rossiter.html.

10
 acknowledgements

Parts of chapter 5 were revised for ‘Processual Media Theory and the
Study of New Media: Towards a New Research Approach’, (with Simon
Cooper) in Kwamena Kwansah-Aidoo (ed.), Topical Issues in Communica-
tions and Media Research, New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2005, pp.
99-119.

Chapter 6 was published as ‘Virtuosity, Processual Democracy and Or-

ganised Networks’, Cultural Studies Review 11.2 (2005): 110-128. Mel-
bourne University Publishing Ltd.

11
Introduction

There is an urgent need for new institutional forms. The uncertainties

of labour and life within network societies and informational
economies have all too clearly exposed the limits of prevailing institu-
tional systems and structures. The key institutions of the modern era –
union, state, firm, university – have proven inadequate to the task of
organizing and managing populations in the past 15-30 years.1 During
this period, many countries have undergone dramatic social change
wrought by the force and impact of reforms peculiar to neoliberal gov-
ernance and economic globalization.2 The challenges of contemporary
governance can be addressed through the creation of new institutional
forms that are responsive to the logic of social-technical networks and
non-representational democratic processes.3 Communication within
networks is about relational processes not representational procedures.
There is no equivalence here with the biopolitical postulate of organ-
ization and management peculiar to informatic modes of neoliberal
governance. Mine are not strategies that contribute to the control of life.
Rather, this book is interested in forms and expressions of governance
that take the elemental force of self-organization seriously. In a sense
everything is a form of self-organization in so far as the world is com-
posed of distinct organic and inorganic patterns, processes and systems.
Institutions face a particularly difficult task when it comes to adapting
to changing environments. More often than not the temporal rhythm of
any particular institution accumulates an asymmetrical relation to the
temporality of elements internal and external to its system. It’s at this
point that disequilibrium characterizes the system. Arguably, many in-
stitutions struggle against this condition today and for this reason new
social-technical platforms of organization are required in order to re-
compose labour and life in ways that furnish a sense of security and sta-
bility within informational systems subject to the unsettling force of
contingency. Such an undertaking requires a transdisciplinary, distribu-

13
organized networks

tive and collaborative institutional form. This form is called the ‘organ-
ized network’.
The network models of sociality made possible by information and
communication technologies have resulted in new forms of social-tech-
nical systems, or what I am calling emergent institutional forms of or-
ganized networks. While these networks can be called institutional
forms in so far as they have a capacity to organize social relations, they
are radically dissimilar to the moribund technics of modern institution-
al forms – or ‘networked organizations’ – such as governments, unions
and firms whose logic of organization is predicated on vertical integra-
tion and representative tenets of liberal democracy.4 Such dynamics
are profoundly unsuited to the collaborative and distributive culture of
networks peculiar to digital communications media and their attendant
socialities.
At times in this book I adopt the unattractive language typically as-
sociated with the rhetoric of neoliberalism. I do so in the interests of a
pragmatism that is necessary if network cultures are to undergo a scalar
and organizational transformation. Similarly, I speak very deliberately
of hierarchical and centralizing tendencies of networks. The social-tech-
nical dynamics of organized networks constitute organization in ways
substantively different from networked organizations.5 Of course ICTs
are common to both forms of organization. There are some fundamen-
tal differences, however: organized networks are co-emergent with digital
communications media, while networked organizations typically pre-
cede the advent of digital ICTs.6 Of special significance is the tendency for
networked organizations to adopt intellectual property rights as the
regulatory architecture for commerce and institutional partnerships
whereas organized networks are often staunch advocates of open source
software and culture.
These kinds of differences also produce tensions within the social-
technical dynamics of networks. There is a prevailing consensus that
experiences of sharing, feedback, flexibility, and friendship are primary
to the culture of networks. I wouldn’t dispute the importance of such
social-technical dynamics. However, it is a mistake to think the hori-
zontal, decentralizing and distributive capacities of digital networks as
immune from a tendency to fall back into hierarchical and centralizing
modes of organization and patterns of behaviour. Indeed, there are

14
 introduction

times when such a move is necessary. Decisions have to be made. As

I discuss in more detail below, the so-called ‘open’ systems of communi-
cation are frequently not only not open, they also elide hierarchical op-
erations that enable networks to become organized. Let us not forget
that flexibility is also the operative mode of post-Fordist labour and its
attendant double-edged sword of economic precarity and ontological
precariousness.7
It is essential to address these challenges in order to create structures
of communication within networks that enable the distribution of re-
sources and the income they generate. Economic models developed
from such technics are immanent to the logic of network cultures and
specific to the situation of communication and practice. In other words,
there will be no universal model that applies to the dynamics of net-
works, which by definition are singular, albeit with patterns, tenden-
cies, and resources that may overlap. Collaborative economies special to
network cultures can be distinguished from the service and delivery
economies of the networked university and its educational commodi-
ties enframed within intellectual property regimes that endow educa-
tion and labour with informational-commodity properties.8
And it’s not as though networked organizations are unaware of the
need to adjust to the informational mode of management. In his fore-
word to a Demos think-tank report entitled Disorganisation: Why Future
Organisations must ‘Loosen Up’, Vice-President of Business Solutions, Or-
ange uk, Mike Newnham outlines what’s at stake for managers that
don’t adapt their organizations to meet the force of informational capi-
talism:

You may feel uncomfortable with the idea if you actually run an or-
ganisation, but there is a clear message evident from the results of
this report: we have to ‘let go’, or ‘disorganise’. Otherwise the employ-
ees that we all need, the brightest and the best, will gravitate to more
open, more flexible set-ups that fit their values and respond to their
aspirations. This will present some real dilemmas.9

You have to wonder whether the message here is for managerial losers
and knuckleheads in government. So many networked organizations
have existed for some time now through casualization and the out-

15
organized networks

sourcing of labour. Remember, this was the logic of multinational cor-

porations since the 1970s, reaching an apogee of delight in the late ’90s
dotcom bubble, and continuing in the post-crash world of Richard
Florida’s ‘creative class’.10 The paradoxical injunction to disorganize
also results in less transparency and accountability in organizations.11
The mechanisms of workers’ representation in the form of unions or
academic councils are also subject to the post-Fordist logic of flexibiliza-
tion, risk and uncertainty. Disorganization within an informational
mode thus corresponds with a broader crisis in representational democ-
racy. Organization, not disorganization, is the challenge facing network
cultures. How to do this within non-representational social-technical
systems of communication is one of the primary vectors of inquiry
throughout this book.
For political projects that wish to go beyond the comfort zones of
consensus communities (as if they exist outside of fantasy, myth and
self-delusion, irrespective of whether one has anarchistic or social-
democratic tendencies), I maintain it is better to engage hegemonic dis-
courses, exploit their political legitimacy, and confront the materialities
of informational communication in order to make concrete the hori-
zons of utopian speculation.12 It would be easy to dismiss such an idea
as a variation of Third Way politics, but to do so would forget the mate-
rialities of communication and sociality of networks that function as
dissonances in the system, and as registrations of ‘the political’.
I should make one thing clear from the outset: this book does not dis-
cuss the numerous open source software and programming practices of
and possibilities for network cultures. Nor does it discuss developments
of social networks and the advent of the much hyped Web 2.0 and Inter-
net2, situated as they are within an uneven geography of information.
Such work is better done in media environments that hold a more prox-
imate relation to the digital unfolding of social-technical developments.
This book is best taken as a general intervention that encourages de-
tailed case studies whose analytical empirics is immanent to the time
and space of network collaborations. This amounts to what Mario Tron-
ti calls ‘concrete research’ in order to create ‘a strategy of the future’.13
One key instantiation of concrete research I foresee for organized net-
works consists of transdisciplinary autonomous education, of which
I say more below. Alternative models as advocated in this book can

16
 introduction

learn from the histories of experimentation in organization as it relates

to institutional form. Organization and its relation to the question of
institutional form, it seems to me, are all too often neglected when
thinking about issues of sustainability and collaboration within
network cultures and social movements.
This book is a search for new technics of organization. It is about
conditions of possibility, the immanent relation between theory and
practice – or what used to go by the name of praxis – and a resolute be-
lief (call it fundamentalism, if you have to) in the concrete potential of
invention, of the creation of transdisciplinary institutional forms that
enlist the absolute force of labour and life. I have arranged this book in
three parts, and left those parts without titles precisely because the
themes of media theory, creative labour and the invention of new insti-
tutional forms slide across each essay, more or less explicitly. Each part
holds its distinctive curiosities of inquiry that signal what I consider the
key trajectories of political intervention for organized networks.
The political concept of organized networks seeks to overcome the
inadequacy of thought about radical social-political movements and
their relation to institutional forms. But it is not my intention to under-
take a sociological study of what is commonly referred to as ‘the move-
ment of movements’. The emphasis instead is on transdisciplinarity as
an immanent practice that brings into question the tendency for net-
work cultures to indulge self-valorisation and horizontal collaboration
rather than attend to the task of governance within stratified networks.

Transdisciplinarity and the Legacy of Form

Transdisciplinarity can be understood as an experimental research
methodology and pedagogy that emerges within the logic of networks
as they traverse diverse institutional forms. To this end, transdiscipli-
narity is a practice interested in the educational capacities of network
cultures. Of course there is much to learn from how other networks are
undertaking their autonomous education initiatives. The accumulation
of best practices is perhaps the most important lesson of all.14 National
contingencies will undoubtedly shape the approaches adopted by dif-
ferent networks, since the advent of open education within an informa-
tional mode is conditioned by the crisis of the modern universities as
they engage the neoliberal forces of commercialization, declining state

17
organized networks

funding and the legal architecture of intellectual property regimes –

all of which are regulated by the transformed sovereign power of the
nation-state.15 But critique is misplaced if it assumes the combinatory
force of national sovereignty and neoliberal ideology as uniform in
its effects.
The reason why there is variation of the neoliberal-sovereignty
nexus across different countries has to do with the fact there is no single
hue of neoliberalism, with different factors and policy responses com-
ing into play that arise out of circumstances peculiar to the nation-state.
This alone presents perhaps the biggest challenge to networks seeking
to collaborate in developing autonomous educational projects, since
transnational relations between networks wishing to intervene in the
composition and experience of education are, to varying degrees, bound
to the logic of their neoliberal states. There are precedents for independ-
ent educational networks across Europe, ranging from the autonomist
learning centres in Italy and the numerous educational workshops run
by migrant networks and activists (often in tandem with cultural festi-
vals or social forums) to the upscale summer schools featuring celebrity
theorists.
Rather than provide a typology of examples such as these, I wish in-
stead to point to what I consider two seminal moments in the prehisto-
ry of organized networks. And this brings us to the question of form.
First, the work of Félix Guattari and others at La Borde, an experimental
institution in anti-psychiatry founded in the 1950s.16 Here we find the
development of concepts such as transversality and the practice of
transdisciplinarity, both of which are primary to a network of networks.
And second, the period following World War II, when the Institute for
Social Research returned to Germany. This passage in which an insti-
tute travels from New York City and Los Angeles to Frankfurt interests
me for the way in which the methods adopted by the Institute are
shaped by, or rather, have to reconcile with the political and historical
situation in which the Institute found itself. The adaptive capacity of
the Institute signals the relation between immanence and transdiscipli-
narity.
The practice of transdisciplinarity preconditions the invention of
new institutional forms. As Gary Genosko notes of the metamethodo-
logy of Félix Guattari, transdisciplinarity is predicated on experiments

18
 introduction

in institutional formation.17 In the case of organized networks, transdis-

ciplinarity is constituted by ‘the political’, by the tensions that underpin
cross-sectoral, multi-institutional engagements that make possible new
modes and new forms of research. Transdisciplinarity can be distin-
guished from interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary research. Despite
all the claims in oecd reports and government and university policy
rhetoric on research, interdisciplinarity is not about networks, but
rather clusters, and typically takes place in ‘private and public labs and
research centres’.18 The uk creative industries model of the public ‘incu-
bator’ as a paternal space of gestation that hatches juvenile innovation
ready for commercial application shares more with science fiction than
it does with processes of invention and trade within information
economies.19 Such settings, and the institutional and political-economic
conditions which shape interdisciplinary research, also result in anoth-
er key difference with transdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity rests with-
in the regime of intellectual property, which operates as an architecture
of control. As such, the knowledge produced is locked up and contain-
ed; it refuses the social relations that make possible the development
of intellectual action, and it therefore refuses the potential for social
transformation because of the way knowledge is enclosed within a
property relation.
The story of the Institute for Social Research predates the advent of
the informational age and the inscription of culture within intellectual
property regimes. Yet this was also a period that saw the industrializa-
tion of culture as a commodity-form, which, as I note below, is the pre-
condition for the information-form characteristic of the creative indus-
tries. More particularly, the Institute embodies the constitutive rela-
tions between organizational form, transdisciplinary methods and his-
torical, political and economic contingencies. In this regard, the work of
the Institute can assist contemporary social-technical networks in
search of precedents to their own experience of inventing new institu-
tional forms.
Existing in effect as a virtual laboratory with shifting residencies at
Columbia University, the American Jewish Committee’s Department of
Scientific Research, and a bungalow in Los Angeles, members of the In-
stitute for Social Research undertook a number of collaborative re-
search projects that enlisted quantitative and qualitative methods along

19
organized networks

with philosophical critique and social theory.20 The organizational role

and diplomatic efforts of Max Horkheimer are incisive here. As some-
one astute to the material situation of intellectual labour, Horkheimer
sacrificed much of his time to the tasks of administration. From his in-
augural speech as Director of the Institute in 1931, Horkheimer set out
a trajectory for transdisciplinary research that combined empirical stud-
ies of social phenomena with the ‘animating impulses’ of philosophical
analysis.21 His ambition was nothing less than ‘permanent collabora-
tion’ between philosophers, sociologists, economists, historians and
psychologists.22 Key to such ‘collective research’ was a proto-network
structure which saw the Institute manifest as a number of international
branches at any one time, ensuring also the maximum potential for sur-
vival should any node happen to collapse. Consider this as a form of
packet-switching for the pre-arpanet age.
Horkheimer’s institutional role contrasts that of Adorno who, as a
devotee to critical theory, adopted with much reluctance and misgiving
what he considered the reductive and internally contradictory empiri-
cal methods of ‘administrative research’ championed by Paul Lazarsfeld
and Berkeley’s Public Opinion Study Group. But even Adorno, sub-
sumed into an institutional persona, found it necessary to change tack
upon returning to the situation of post-war Germany. Even if Adorno’s
derision of empirical research and its mechanized techniques continued
in a more muted form throughout his life, the Institute – and especially
Horkheimer – exploited its association with ‘advanced’ American
empirical research methods. Government, university, industry and us
occupational forces perceived such methods as worthy of financial sup-
port for the reconstruction of cities, the reform of university disciplines,
and the diagnosis of fascist, anti-democratic tendencies in an emergent
consumer society.23 Rolf Wiggershaus’s comprehensive study of the
Frankfurt School recounts one aspect of this engagement with authori-
ties in the effort to secure funding for the Institute:

In 1950 the us High Commissioner, John McCloy, put dm 200,000

at the Institute’s disposal, with a further dm 235,000 for rebuilding.
This energetic support sprang from a belief among those responsible
for American policy in Germany that sociology, particularly when

20
 introduction

represented by American citizens and with its emphasis on empirical

research, was a factor in promoting democracy.24

This strategy of advancing political and economic interests through

client organizations has since become a hallmark of us foreign policy,
which extends to the structural adjustment programmes of the Interna-
tional Monetary Fund (imf) and World Bank and auxiliary role often
played by non-governmental organizations (ngos) as civil society actors.
And it was a gamble that Horkheimer was willing to take in the mixed-
up world of post-war Germany. Here was the opportunity for scalar en-
hancement that had been unravelling for some time in the us as the In-
stitute’s funds became increasingly scarce, coupled with fragile rela-
tions with collaborating individuals and institutions. By diversifying
the sources of funding from a range of authorities, the Institute sought
not only to maximize its funding potential, but also to create a structure
in which a prevailing discourse of practical research distributed across
institutions gave legitimacy – or at least some protection – to the more
speculative philosophical interests held by Institute members, Adorno
in particular.
What we find here is an instance in which the institution itself takes
on the capacity of an actor engaged in ‘immanent critique’ – another
key ‘metamethod’ in thinking the complex relations that comprise the
transdisciplinary research of organized networks. This is an experimen-
tal methodology in which the time and space of research is inseparable
from the labour and life of networks. Without the scalar purchase of-
fered by the Institute for Social Research, its individual members could
hope for little to no traction with funding authorities. The tragic con-
clusion of Walter Benjamin’s life is not only a story of exodus from Nazi
Europe. It was also a consequence of an individual whose personal re-
sources, while a catalyst for an inventive life, were insufficiently and all
too irregularly connected to the supportive framework offered by the
form of the Institute. In other words, Benjamin’s was a life that carried
the intense burden of existence external to anything but the most mini-
mal infrastructures. The Institute for Social Research, on the other
hand, conducted immanent critique by inculcating the general intellect
of members who held a more proximate relation to an institutional per-
sona. This accumulation of knowledge and know-how enabled the In-

21
organized networks

stitute to readily adapt to changing geopolitical circumstances, taking

its members along for the ride.
At the theoretical level, immanent critique takes its primary lessons
from Deleuze, Foucault and Adorno with important input from Canadi-
an political economist and communications scholar Harold A. Innis.
Immanent critique is a method of post-negativity. It retains Adorno’s in-
sistence that contradictions and tensions operate as a constituent force
within any idiom of expression; yet at the same time it recognizes that
sociality within network cultures and creative economies is configured
not according to dualisms, but rather to patterns of distribution,
rhythms of tension, transversal social relations, modulations of affect
and transdisciplinary institutional practices. In this sense, immanent
critique understands the antagonism of the constituent outside as a
processual force of affirmation as distinct from the ‘negation of nega-
tion’. On this point, my position differs from that of Slavoj Zizek, who
reads the Hegelian ‘negation of negation’ as ‘nothing but repetition at
its purest: in the first move, a certain gesture is accomplished and fails;
then, in the second move, this same gesture is simply repeated’.25 Such
a manoeuvre, I would argue, does not account for the indeterminacy of
difference that attends the affirmative role of a network of networks as
it subsists within the constituent outside. This amounts to a form of
post-negativity in which the operation of a constituent outside perme-
ates social-technical and historical conditions of the present.
All instituted forms retain a relation with the constituent outside, no
matter how much their logic of organization is predicated on the con-
tainment of expression and exclusion of ‘the political’. Since organized
networks consist of loose affiliations where participants have the free-
dom to come and go, they are particularly susceptible to the disruptive
force of the constituent outside. Movement across borders always en-
hances the chance of alien infiltrations. This is both a strength and a
weakness. On the one hand, it is a source of renewal, reinvention and
mitigates tendencies to excessive bureaucratization often associated
with institutionalization. And on the other hand, the constituent out-
side holds the potential to wreak unexpected demolition. For these rea-
sons, the scalar transformation of organized networks as new institu-
tional forms is always a fragile, uncertain process.

22
 introduction

Institutions function to organize social relations. It follows, then,

that the social-technical dynamics peculiar to a range of digital media
technologies (mailing lists, collaborative blogs, wikis, content manage-
ment systems) institute new modes of networked sociality. It is easy for
both leftist activists and techno-libertarians to dismiss this process of
emergent institution formation. Many would assert that it simply re-
sults in a bureaucratization and rigidity of social-technical communica-
tion systems whose default setting is one of flows, decentralization,
horizontality, etcetera. I would suggest such knee-jerk, technically
incorrect responses risk a disengagement from the political and thus
from politics. There is a passivity that attends this kind of position.
Moreover, it is a position that fails the politics of reappropriating the
psychic, social and semiotic territory of institutions. The process of
instituting networks, on the other hand, involves a movement toward
the strategic rather than tactical dimension of Net politics. Another
reason to turn towards the strategic dimension has to do with the short-
termism that accompanies many tactical projects. The logic of the tactic
is one of situated intervention. And then it disappears. There are of
course some notable exceptions – Indymedia, Makrolab and the Yes
Men come to mind as quite long-term experiments in networks and
tactical media; yet these exceptions are not, I would suggest, instances
of transdisciplinarity.
This is not to dispense with tactics since tactics are the source of re-
newal. Without the tactical, organized networks collapse into stasis. In-
terestingly enough, tactics parallel the logic of capital. We see this oper-
ation historically time and again. Just consider core-periphery relations
and the ways in which capital has to incorporate or appropriate the
margins in order to replenish and reproduce itself. Such movements are
similar to what Brian Holmes identifies as the cooptation of the produc-
tive efforts of the artist, cultural critic, designer.26 It’s therefore impor-
tant to remember that autonomists are not somehow located outside
the state but rather operating as a disruptive potentiality whose differ-
ence is defined by relations of negation, refusal, exodus, subtraction,
and so forth. Certainly there are important qualitative differences in the
relation individuals and peoples have with the state. Think, for in-
stance, of the experience of migrants, precarious workers and so-called
illegal movement of peoples across territories. Precarity, let’s remember,

23
organized networks

is an experience that traverses a range of class scales, and may even be

considered as a post-Fordist technique of border control that distin-
guishes ‘self-managed exploitation . . . from those who must be exploit-
ed (or worse) by direct coercion’.27 The emergence internationally of
creative industries over the past eight years underscores the precarious
situation of creative labour in so far as informational labour is the pre-
condition for the exploitation of intellectual property.

Informational Labour in the Creative Industries

Cultural and media research on the creative industries has tended to-
wards a policy orientation, and it needs to be complemented with other
methodologies, practices and fields of inquiry. Some are obvious, such
as political economy, critiques of intellectual property regimes, the
adoption of Creative Commons and the business implications of non-
proprietary licenses such as Copyleft. And some are less obvious, such
as the question of network socialities, the virtuosity of the general intel-
lect, the precarity of creative labour, and so forth. By undertaking trans-
disciplinary practice to investigate the material conditions of interna-
tional creative industries, my own approach forges connections be-
tween these complementarities with the aim of organizing new institu-
tional forms of agency and sustainability for creative labour and life in
an informational era of network cultures. This is a collaborative project
that goes beyond the accounts documented in this book.
It is perhaps necessary to make a distinction between the cultural
industries and the creative industries. For the occasional observer, it
seems as though the cultural industries imperceptibly morphed into
the creative industries at some stage during the late 1990s. But this shift
was no accident. The rise of creative industries corresponds with two
key moments, one to do with a Blair government policy intervention in
1998 and the other to do with the informatization of social relations in-
augurated in 1995 by the wto’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of
Intellectual Property Rights (trips). And both need to be understood in
the historical context of the dotcom era – a period in which start-ups
were the unsustainable virus and boosterism infiltrated any number of
discourses and institutional practices.
The shift from cultural industries to creative industries is also fig-
ured in the move from negative dialectics to network socialities. Such is

24
 introduction

the passage from state-regulated culture industries and broadcast media

to creative production within informational economies and network
media. In a more hesitant way, perhaps the remainder common to cul-
tural industries and creative industries is the continuum of creativity as
instrumental in the policy realm and autonomous in the realm of expe-
rience.
The policy moment of the creative industries is a case in which a
structural determination takes place. The vast majority of academic re-
search and local government initiatives associated with the creative in-
dustries was, and still is, shaped by government policy directives. With-
in the institution of the university, creative industries are essentially a
research perspective derived from government policy interventions re-
flecting a regulatory commitment that in many ways exceeds that of
the cultural industries. Here we find yet another contradiction internal
to the ideology of the neoliberal state, which purports to deregulate in-
stitutional impediments to global capital flows. Academic perspectives
have only gradually and reluctantly, if at all, articulated their own criti-
cal creative industries idiom in response.28 This stems from the mission
set out by national governments for academics to undertake rather
crudely understood exercises in ‘mapping’ the empirical scope of cre-
ative industries.
In 1998 and then revised in 2001, the Blair government’s Department
of Culture, Media and Sport (dcms) produced the Task Force Mapping
Documents that sought to aggregate 13 otherwise distinct sectors such
as media and advertising, architecture and design, music and entertain-
ment, interactive video games, film and even the arts and crafts, which
are part of what is also known as the heritage industries. This diverse
field of practices was subsumed under the primary definition of the
dcms, which has since gone on to define how the creative industries
have been adopted internationally by governments and policy re-
searchers: the creative industries, according the dcms, consists of ‘the
generation and exploitation of intellectual property’.29 The informa-
tional dimension of creative industries, and the move away from the
cultural industries, is embodied in this definition – economic value in
the creative industries is derived from the potential of exchange value
in the form of intellectual property. In other words, the creative indus-
tries are a brand economy. Even more so, the rise of creative industries

25
organized networks

has to be understood in conjunctural terms. Witness, for example, the

rise of the information-form as the dominant commodity-form, which
is also how the creative industries relate back to culture industries. The
wto’s regulatory architecture for intellectual property is itself a conse-
quence of this.
But there are some important aspects to the dcms’s definition that are
too frequently and easily overlooked by most researchers: namely, the
conditions and experience of creative labour as it relates to intellectual
property regimes, which I go on to discuss in detail in chapters 3 and 4.
This analytical omission and political abandon by academics who at
earlier stages in their careers were not shy about their leftist persuasion
is not to be unexpected. Many, after all, have been infected by the dot-
com hype, and party like it’s still 1999. The reasons for this have to do
with temporal rhythms that differ across institutions, and even though
government and the university are firmly enmeshed in market
economies, they none the less move at a speed slower than industry.
And this means the crash of the nasdaq in April 2000 might as well not
have happened.
While it’s healthy for social ecologies to maintain a diversity of tem-
poral modes, it has none the less lead to a form of obscurantism in most
research on the creative industries. Here, I am speaking of the invisible
remainder that operates as the ‘constitutive outside’ of ‘the generation
and exploitation of intellectual property’.30 In assuming a link between
creativity and proprietarization, the analytical and political oversight of
most creative industries research is that it fails to acknowledge the fact
that ‘the generation and exploitation of intellectual property’ is condi-
tioned by the exploitation of labour-power. For this reason, most of the
empirical research on creative industries paraded by academics and pol-
icy-makers alike is not only deeply unimaginative, it also results in re-
search that holds little correlation with the actually existing material
conditions of the creative industries. And it’s at this point that my argu-
ments on creative industries take off in chapters 3 and 4.
In studying the relations between labour-power and the creative in-
dustries my interest has been twofold: first, at a theoretical and political
level, I have sought to invent concepts and methodologies that address
the question of the organization of labour-power within network soci-
eties and informational economies. Here, my research relates to and has

26
 introduction

been informed by what the political philosopher Paolo Virno calls ‘the
thorniest of problems: how to organize a plurality of “social individu-
als” that, at the moment, seems fragmented, constitutionally exposed to
blackmail – in short, unorganizable?’31 Out of an interest in new forms
of agency in the creative industries, this book considers how currently
disorganized labour in the creative industries might institute a mode of
organizing sociality immanent to networked forms of communications
media.
Secondly, my research has investigated the double-edged sword of
precarity within post-Fordist economies, to which the creative indus-
tries belong as a service economy modulated through informational re-
lations.32 The precarity of labour-power within the creative industries is
double-edged in the sense that it enables the attractions of flexibility –
the escape from the Fordist time of the factory and the firm – yet accom-
panying these relative freedoms and expressive potential for new forms
of organization is the dark side of what researchers such as Ulrich Beck,
Scott Lash, John Urry and Judith Butler have variously called risk, un-
certainty, complexity and insecurity. Such fields of inquiry resonate
with the concept of organized networks, neither of which are rarely ad-
dressed from within creative industries research, but hold tremendous
potential for the development of the kind of critical perspectives that I
think are missing.
While there is a distinctive homogeneity in the way creative indus-
tries travels internationally as a policy discourse, the material, econom-
ic and cultural diversity of neoliberal capitalism – its amenability and
capacities for adaptation to national and city-state modulations – en-
ables creative industry style developments to be translated in ways that
seem improbable if analysis focuses exclusively at the level of policy re-
production. Such considerations reinforce the need to understand the
variable and uneven dynamics of global capitalism, whose indices in-
clude the movement of cultural commodities, labour and ideas. The
modern world-system of nation-states play a significant role here in reg-
ulating such mobility through the mechanisms of trade agreements,
border controls and iprs.
Here it is necessary to analyse the constitutive power of intra-region-
al, international macro-structural and trans-local micro-political forces.
In other words, in order to make intelligible the patterns of global

27
organized networks

neoliberalism, one must attend critically to the peculiarities of

subnational scales (the micro dimension) and weigh these against
international forces (the macro dimension). Only then does it become
possible to assemble the complex relations that compose the shifting
cartographies and life-worlds of neoliberal capitalism. One place to start
such analyses is on the institutional front, for all action is embedded in
institutional settings of one kind or another. For reasons that I hope
become apparent, the university is my particular choice of institution
when it comes to registering the force of neoliberal capitalism and the
conditions of exodus and invention.

Informational Universities and Neoliberalism as a Condition of Possibility

With its symbiotic relationship with the publishing industry and
professions and exclusive accreditation by the state, the university has
long held what Harold Innis calls a ‘monopoly of knowledge’.33 In ways
not dissimilar from the church or the state, the institutional form of the
university has endured over time and, in recent years, extended over
space, modelling the multinational logic of the corporation. The univer-
sity’s concern to assert control over space corresponds with a shift in
focus from the national cultivation of the citizen-subject to a capturing
of the transnational consumer-client. Within a neoliberal climate of
pseudo-deregulation and increasing privatization, the institutional
borders of the university become more porous. Rather than lament
this transformation of the university and its monopoly of knowledge,
I instead see openings and possibilities for new institutional forms.
A focus on educational resources strikes me as a matter of tactics that
feed strategic interests.
Knowledge contexts that for good reasons – autonomy chief among
them – have resided outside the borders of the university are now pre-
sented with a scalar challenge to organize as networks in transdiscipli-
nary ways. Here I am thinking of migrant networks, media activists,
ngos, think-tanks, small business associations, community organiza-
tions, architecture and urban design platforms, and so forth. These can
all broadly be understood as social-political networks increasingly sub-
ject to, if not always thoroughly embracing, the logic of informatiza-
tion. Yet they retain their distinct features and properties that imbue
the educational encounter and structure of relations with qualitative

28
 introduction

differences. Organized networks are waiting to emerge as concrete

research in the form of new educational institutions.
Over the past decade it has become clear that digital technologies
have opened up new possibilities in the production and distribution of
content and are redefining the reception and creation of knowledge.
Changes in the organizational capacities of institutions have accompa-
nied these developments. Following Bill Readings’ The University in
Ruins, Kevin Robins and Frank Webster note how the modern liberal
university was coextensive with the interests of the modern nation-
state and ‘the reproduction of national knowledge and national
culture’.34 In a period of transnational capitalism, the capacity of the
university to remain bound to such a national agenda is greatly
diminished. Nowadays, the university, like so many institutions, must
accommodate the complexities concomitant with global market
economies. The problem is that the organizational form of the
university is ill-suited to such dynamics. Despite the reform agendas of
universities in advanced economies over the past 15 to 20 years, their
efforts at adapting to information economies and networked socialities
have proven to be largely ineffective in dealing with the challenge of
innovation and problematic of contingency due to the predominant
adherence to the strictures of intellectual property regimes coupled
with cumbersome bureaucratic systems. In this respect, universities
remain embedded within a national system, since it is the responsibility
of the member states and their legal organs to regulate intellectual
property violations in accordance with the trips Agreement.35
The past thirty or so years have seen the university advance into and
simultaneously condition the information economy, as witnessed by
the connection between intellectual property, publishing, the informa-
tization of labour, and the commercially driven practices of the univer-
sity.36 This has created a tension between universities as public institu-
tions and universities as private enterprises increasingly dependent on
externally generated forms of income (consultancies, quasi-state and in-
dustry research funds, commercial applications, etcetera). Furthermore,
the concept of the university as an institution with an exclusive pur-
chase on the administration and provision of knowledge and learning is
undergoing transformation as countries with advanced economies open
the ‘market’ of education to private providers. Paradoxically, perhaps,

29
organized networks

neoliberalism – with its logic of outsourcing, privatization and dissem-

bling institutional frameworks – conditions the possibility of organized
networks. Moreover, neoliberalism has resulted in a weakening of colle-
gial bonds and organizing capacities within the institutional form of
the university. And this is where the story of organized networks as
new institutional forms within the field of education begins.
From a strategic perspective, then, one obvious collaborative interest
of organized networks is to consider what the scalar transformation of
organized networks entails vis-à-vis the aggregation of educational
resources distributed within and across networks. Networks have been
fantastic at developing educational resources such as documentation of
open source software, course materials, health-care information, tips on
political organization, and so forth. Obviously there’s a lot to learn from
ngos and the revival of union organizing as seen in the ‘Justice for Jani-
tors’ movement in the usa.37 Certainly my position is not to dismiss
these institutional forms outright. Here it is necessary to recognize the
situation of informational politics. Just as ngos and civil society organi-
zations (csos) have filled the void created by the neoliberal state’s evacu-
ation from the social, so too must organized networks seize upon the in-
stitutional persona of the ‘external provider’.38
For collaborative research networks situated within the context of
the European Union (eu), the project of constructing new institutional
forms in the field of higher education holds a substantive relation to the
Bologna Process.39 The twin tasks of aggregating educational resources
common to network cultures and developing business models that en-
able the mobilization of these resources is central to the ambitions of
the Bologna Process.40 Despite the fact that organized networks do not
register within such policy, it is strategic to recognize that universities
do not hold an exclusive purchase on higher education and research.
There is provision – rhetorical as it may be – for non-university net-
works to enter the field of formalized education. Key to such a develop-
ment is an engagement with the accreditation procedures in order for
organized networks to operate as new business forms in the field of edu-
cation.41 To realize this concrete ambition requires assembling a ‘net-
work of networks’ as unique platforms of delivery and dissemination of
educational materials premised on open source principles.

30
 introduction

The scale of administration associated with this task can very easily
appear overwhelming, and the prospect of entering into the complex
slog of legal frameworks can be an immediate stumbling block to the
process of scaling up. Yet incorporation as a legal entity is a necessary
step if networks are to play the game of suprastate funding in the eu.42
Though it must be said, this is not without its own hazards and compli-
cations. In this regard there is much to learn from peer-to-peer migrant
networks, media activism and border academy projects such as those
coordinated by Florian Schneider and Susanne Lang.43 In a conversation
earlier this year about registering networks as corporate entities, Lang
informed me that in Germany at least such a task can be performed rela-
tively swiftly once the necessary procedures are understood and then
coordinated as tasks distributed within the network. This is an instance
where national and possibly subnational policies on the registration of
an organization may cause tensions for networks of transnational orien-
tation. A decision has to be made about national location. Take it is as a
matter of paperwork and then move on. But that option requires a hos-
pitable and user-friendly legal system, and people who know how to
work it. In many cases, this will not be the case, and there is little choice
but to negotiate the legislative institutional power that regulates partic-
ipation by organizations in the market of education.
There’s no question that the political stakes are high in such an un-
dertaking, and there will be many who are quick to charge such a proj-
ect as selling out. The reality is that organized networks will never be
funded through state subsidies in the way that much of the cultural sec-
tor, along with ngos for that matter, has and continues to be, in Europe
at least, along with its neo-imperial offshoots. As a result, organized net-
works have no choice but to come up with business models. Otherwise
they can only amble along in parasitic mode, taking a bit here and bit
there from their unwitting hosts (frequently universities). As far as I can
determine, an intervention into the education market is one of the few
ways in which organized networks may obtain economic autonomy,
which depends upon securing an economic base. Without this, organ-
ized networks have little chance of sustainability and little possibility
of scalar transformation.
There is a capacity for networks to mobilize their resources in trans-
versal ways in the form of master classes, summer schools, and training

31
organized networks

programmes that operate both internally to and externally from univer-

sities. Universities are undergoing a process of losing their expertise,
their ability to bring in new knowledge and to transform the disci-
plines, which have become incredibly rigid and dull. Universities can be
characterized by their deficiency of thought. They don’t know how to
move themselves in ways that incorporate what Gregory Bateson called
‘a difference which makes a difference’.44 The strange thing is that neoliber-
alism makes possible the difference which makes a difference. This is
the perversity of neoliberalism. The structural logic of neoliberalism
makes possible openings, and openings invite interventions that begin
to enable the financing of autonomous, precarious, experimental re-
search and teaching that shows no sign of being catered for in current
oecd, government and university policy directives.
My proposal can be easily criticized for appropriating the outside –
the experimental elements that so often energize networks on the front-
line of invention – and closing it down again. This is the classic critique
of appropriation. We see this most obviously in the fashion industries.
Remember punk? If you wanted, you could pay 200 bucks for a pair of
jeans with a rip in them. Hilariously, there was no shortage of idiots
who went out and purchased their damaged goods. The same can be
said about knowledge. What functions against the closure of minds and
resources is the fact that educational business projects undertaken by a
network of networks are predicated on principles of open source soft-
ware, society and culture. Obviously there will be fights over how best
to redistribute funds within and across networks. But that’s a matter
that can be sorted out. Having said this, a problem remains. There is
only so much free labour that can be done within the networks.45 Cer-
tainly it helps networks to have a parasitical relation with networked
organizations (universities, for example). But eventually free labour
exhausts itself. And as I go on to discuss in chapters 3 and 4, this is
something researchers and policy-makers in the creative industries are
highly reluctant to address.
The university is actually a vulnerable institution. It is quite uncer-
tain, and indeed could be characterized as a place of precarity. As many
have experienced, the labour force of universities is predominantly
composed of casual workers whose seasonal pattern of employment re-
sembles that of the strawberry picker. Unions typically fail to represent

32
 introduction

the interests of casual workers, since their interest is to protect the secu-
rity of those with tenured positions. The work of Marc Bousquet on the
constitutive relations between informal economies and the information
university is instructive here in so far as he locates the economic and
managerial problematic of labour as key to understanding the coinci-
dence between neoliberal policy-making, the commercialization of
education and informatization of social relations. As Bousquet writes,
‘informationalization is about delivering labor in the mode of informa-
tion’.46 Thus labour, and not the advancement of technological systems,
is the primary source from which surplus value of the educational com-
modity form is derived. Just as cyber-libertarians maintain that ‘infor-
mation wants to be free’, so publishers in the digital games industry
(and open source software businesses, for that matter) are overjoyed
with the abundance of free labour and innovation in the form of ‘mod-
ding’ (computer game modification) by gamers.47 Increasingly, the on-
tics of labour becomes inseparable from the ontology of information.
There is nothing especially new in such an observation – how can we
forget the insights of Marx? – but it is an important reminder that alter-
native models would do well to take on board when questioning the
dominance of informatized education as a commercial undertaking
that severs the sociality of production from the commodity form. The
role of international institutions in the governance of populations, in-
formation and trade is important here, and the World Summit on the
Information Society (wsis) serves as an instructive case for this book.

Collaboration and Governance in New Institutional Forms

Two recent reports commissioned by international institutions high-
light the central importance of new institutional forms if problems of
democracy, accountability, fairness and sustainability are to be ad-
dressed in the twenty-first century. The International Labour Organiza-
tion’s World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization
‘warns that we have reached a crisis stage in the legitimacy of our politi-
cal institutions, whether national or international. There is an urgent
need to rethink current institutions of global economic governance,
whose rules and policies . . . are largely shaped by powerful countries
and powerful players’.48 Similarly, an oecd report titled Governance in the
21st Century highlights the challenges as follows:

33
organized networks

Organisational and creative liberty . . . has very exacting precondi-

tions. In the future, more diffused approaches to governance in all
parts of society will only work if there are frameworks in place that
assure very high levels of transparency, accountability and integrity.
At the same time, for public authorities and society more broadly,
the ability to put new forms of governance into the service of realis-
ing people’s collective good will depend on a common commitment
to democratic values, human rights and equality of opportunity.
Even with these frameworks and values in place, the emergence of
new forms of governance will still depend fundamentally on the
capacity of individuals and groups to participate actively in making
and implementing decisions.49

It is precisely the issues outlined here that organized networks, as a pol-

icy intervention and social-technical practice, seek to address. Through
the primary vectors of inquiry – protocols, self-organization, scaleabili-
ty, sustainability – the project of organized networks both assesses and
undertakes the construction of new institutional forms that engage di-
verse populations in creating mechanisms and resources for labour and
life in information societies, bringing new models to international chal-
lenges of cultural diversity, migration, creative innovation and open ed-
ucation. The problem remains, however, that organized networks do
not yet exist as recognized actors either within the stratum of policy dis-
course or as concrete-potentialities. What we have, none the less, is a
steady accumulation of energies, best practices, concept translators, sit-
uated projects, and so forth. Along with taking on board the lessons
from pre-digital institutions of experimental research, there is also
much to learn from international efforts and failures to coordinate
cross-institutional encounters in the information society.
The collaborative project of inventing new institutional forms holds
an affinity, remote as that may be, with the experiences, process and
political form of ‘multi-stakeholderism’ between government, business
and csos during the un’s World Summit on the Information Society.
However, multi-stakeholderism generates tension as it often requires
csos and ngos to institutionalize themselves to gain recognition from
government and business stakeholders, often decoupling decision-mak-
ing processes from the grass roots networks that are these organiza-

34
 introduction

tions’ key constituency. Such an operation typifies the vertical system

of communication and governance within networked organizations (as
distinct from organized networks).
Again, this is not to say that hierarchies and centralizing tendencies
are absent from or not intrinsic to organized networks. Rather, it is to
recognize that conflicting, non-assimilable hierarchies distinguish or-
ganized networks from networked organizations. Corporations, govern-
ments, universities and unions are among the key institutions that have
been able to proliferate internationally and engage each other precisely
because they hold equivalent hierarchical systems of organization. A
government minister talks to a chief executive officer of a corporation
who also occupies a position on an academic board. Communication
flows, decisions are made, and policies are set into motion. My argu-
ment is that such organizational systems do not suit the logic of infor-
mation economies and network cultures. None the less, the modern po-
litical and economic success of institutions associated with networked
organizations rests in their capacity to reproduce hierarchical systems
of organization. This is not the case for organized networks whose only
common standard resides in the Transmission Control Protocol/Inter-
net Protocol (tcp/ip), which needs to be understood as a technical stan-
dard shaped by economic and political interests. While the accumula-
tion of best practices suggests that organized networks may develop
common platforms of communication, the pragmatic decision is one
that emerges internally from the culture of dissension characteristic of
a network of networks. This relational dynamic between the act of deci-
sion and the culture of dissension may be the basis upon which the
scalar transformation rests. How to manage this is an open question.
Herein lies the challenge of governance and indeed collaboration.
The multi-stakeholderism model does not address these tensions, and is
thus unsuccessful as a governance model for networks. The political
concept of organized networks, however, understands conflict as a gen-
erative force in need of both collaborative methodologies and transdis-
ciplinary frameworks. These are key problems of communication and
governance that organized networks must address if they wish to oper-
ate successfully as new institutional forms composed of diverse and
fluctuating constituencies, where people hold the freedom to come
and go.50

35
organized networks

While the organized network has a relative institutional autonomy,

it must engage, by necessity, other institutional partners who may often
be opposed to their interests. Organized networks share something with
ngos, csos and even think-tanks. Yet there is a radical dissimilarity and
qualitative difference between organized networks and these institu-
tional forms. Take ngos and csos, for example, and the techniques of
governance adopted throughout the wsis process. Within any partner-
ship there is of course a compromise. In order to obtain the necessary
discursive legitimacy required to participate within the institutional
settings of wsis, ngos and csos had to engage a model of organization
that was antithetical to the self-organizing logic of networks. ngos and
csos were thus required to adopt the representational form known
throughout wsis as multi-stakeholderism – the primary model of
governance for managing, if not realizing, relations between business,
government and civil society. Multi-stakeholderism is predicated on
representative models of liberal democracy, and such abstraction
always refers to itself and thus frequently conflicts with the grass-roots
networks that characterize the constituent dimension of ngos and csos.
Representation does not correspond with the logic of networks, which
are better understood as non-representational forms of politics.
In saying this I do not wish to valorise the horizontality of networks.
The tendency to describe networks in terms of horizontality results in
an occlusion of ‘the political’, which consists of antagonisms that un-
derpin sociality. It is technically and socially incorrect to assume that
hierarchical and centralizing architectures and practices are absent
from network cultures. At the technical level, one only has to look at
the debates surrounding the information society and Internet gover-
nance: hierarchical and political-economic aspects of assigning domain
names, location of root servers, politics of iprs, uneven geography of in-
formation flows, determination of standards, and effects of trade agree-
ments on content production and distribution. The hierarchical dimen-
sion to networked sociality is easy to account for: just consider the co-
hort of alpha males scheming in the back rooms of so many organiza-
tional forms. Even in the case of wikis, which on the surface appear to
be exemplary non-representational forms in so far as labour on content
production is anonymous, again we need only to venture through the
backdoor to see the ringleaders at work.51

36
 introduction

Of course the technical and social aspects of ICT networks are not mu-
tually exclusive, but rather interpenetrate one another in a plethora of
ways. A challenge for organized networks is thus to address the soft-
ware problem and the social problem. This is no easy feat, and can be
related back to my earlier point regarding whether or not to incorporate
networks as a legally registered entity – an option I suggested was nec-
essary if networks wished to intervene in the market of higher educa-
tion. Joseph Reagle’s blog entry on ‘Open Communities and Closed Law’
signals what might be identified as the fundamental disjuncture be-
tween horizontal and vertical organization and communication sys-
tems:

What does the recent news of a Wikipedia ceo who is also a lawyer,
an ‘oversight’ function that makes hidden revisions to Wikipedia,
and the threat of the Debian Project severing its relationship with its
legally chartered non-profit have in common? A strong indication
that open communities with a formal legal standing are a conflicted
beast.52

Reagle goes on to note that such tension is a hazard of scale: ‘As Wiki-
pedia has grown in size and repute the likelihood of the Wikipedia
being subject to legal action has similarly grown’. It is pointless to think
that networks might somehow exist as tension-free zones. Sure, it is a
matter of degree, but I see no escape from this, and consider it a varia-
tion of ‘the political’ that attends scalar transformation for any network.
To this end, this book engages the question of democracy as constituent
process that registers the political dimension of networks.

Institutions beyond Democracy

As I finished this book my reservations about concepts of democracy
ran deep. What does democracy mean and consist of, after all, in the log-
ic of networks (another term that is open to any number of meanings)?
And in another register, as Antonio Negri writes, ‘the problem is that
the term “democracy” has been emptied of all its meaning. Democracy
is said to be identified with “the people” – but what is the people?’53 In
the first and most simple instance, my problem rests with the uneasy,
and what I consider as ultimately incompatible, transposition or graft-

37
organized networks

ing of democracy onto networks. With stupefying frequency, advocates

of ‘e-democracy’ and community oriented Internet users and re-
searchers are among the chief culprits who maintain the Net is synony-
mous with democracy. But that critique is easy. There is also a more
general view on the democratizing capacity of the Internet, manifesting
in the production of countless speeches, newspaper columns, policy
recommendations, and everyday conversations. Such a position
assumes the core principles and practices of democracy can be shunted
over to networks. But can they?
In my view, the question of form is paramount here. This is as much
an issue of the technical and material dimensions of Internet based
communications media as it is of the processual relations through
which expression takes shape. The registration of form, in other words,
only becomes apparent through the movement of expression.54 More-
over, I wish to place the emphasis here on institutional forms rather than
institutions per se.55 Forms are open to the movement of networks and
the network of movements. Both are in constant tension with institu-
tionalization, which I understand as the reification of form. Since it is
only revealed through expression, form holds no relation to formalism,
which is another iteration of reification, stasis and establishment.
Form thus initiates a kind of border zone, a space of ‘the political’, and
contests all efforts at containment. This is its paradox. Form gives a sem-
blance of order and finitude, but since the individuation of expression
institutes the territory of form, an uncertainty always lingers about
form. Form can never rest secure that it has captured expression. Its
strategy of the future is precipitated by insecurity, uncertainty, hesita-
tion, ambivalence. At best, expression is momentarily organized within
the borders of form. It is through this dynamic that I understand Sandro
Mezzadra and Étienne Balibar, who maintain the border signals
‘the “non-democratic” element of democracy’.56 This is also how and
why liberal democracy is precisely not coextensive with the logic of
networks, whose transversal relations institute new organizational
forms that cut across the struggles of the movements and the policing
of the state.
Angela Mitropoulos and Brett Neilson contest this assertion on
borders and the ‘non-democratic’ element of democracy, noting the
inclusion-exclusion function of the border makes possible not only the

38
 introduction

regulation of the market and ‘foundation of citizenship and politics’,

but, moreover, ‘there can be no democracy without the border’.57
In other words, it is precisely the border that joins demos (people) with
kratos (sovereign authority). Democracy, then, is a political idiom of
limits and its deficiencies need to be understood in the terms and condi-
tions by which it operates. My argument is not to suggest that networks
are somehow borderless or beyond limits. That particular imaginary
belongs to cyber-libertarians, free marketeers, and the like. Rather, my
position is simply that while networks in many ways are regulated
indirectly by the sovereign interests of the state, they are also not
reducible to institutional apparatuses of the state. And this is what
makes possible the creation of new institutional forms as expressions
of non-representational democracy.
The potential for non-representational democracy within social-
technical settings of digital communication networks is predicated
on the materiality of informatization and informationality. Tiziana
Terranova makes this clear in her book Network Culture in which she
locates linguistic and political representation as the mode of expression
and organization peculiar to the ‘perspectival and three-dimensional
space of modernity’.58 The modern episteme thus rests on distinctions
between subject and object, observer and observed in order to create its
grid of intelligibility. Such a paradigm is inherently insecure and insuf-
ficient as a resource to understand and act within complex systems. As
Terranova notes, information theory arose in the 1920s from the fields
of mathematics, physics and telecommunications, and later biology and
anthropology in the 1940s-’60s as studies in cybernetics develop in
parallel with the military-industrial complex and its interest in the
organization and management of populations. As I discuss in chapter 5,
the problem engaging these fields was how ‘noise’ or feedback rendered
communication as an unstable, mutable system. Noise came to be
recognized as the precondition for renewal and regeneration within an
open system. The limit and thus crisis of representation corresponds
with its incapacity to account for complexity, entropy, indeterminacy
and non-linearity that characterizes immersive informational environ-
ments organized about the logic of relations.59 To think the possibility
of democracy within informational social-technical systems calls, then,
for non-representational models.

39
organized networks

I have considered removing democracy entirely in reference to net-

works, replacing it instead with the seemingly less formal term ‘poli-
tics’. But even politics, as an articulation of ‘the political’, tends to pre-
suppose a formal arrangement within which the antagonistic field of
sociality is instituted. More often than not, the process of institution
formation and thus determining the legitimacy of politics is attributed
to a sovereign power, be that one of secular or non-secular authority.
Irrespective of the various idioms of democracy (rational consensus,
deliberative, procedural, direct, radical, etcetera),60 it is typically associ-
ated with the triumph of the secular rather than non-secular state. Of
course there is an historical basis and tradition of thought behind this.
My point, however, is that democracy beyond and within the secular
state is a process of translation that is predicated on a hegemonic opera-
tion that, in many instances, annuls the political. Or as Tronti puts it,
‘The workers’ movement was not defeated by capital. The workers’
movement was defeated by democracy’.61 For this reason new institu-
tional spaces are needed in order to give formal expression to the politi-
cal without which the descent into violence, dysfunctionality and mal-
content proliferates. Or even worse, acquiescence. In his Posthegemony
blog, Jon Beasley-Murray phrases the impasse of politics without
democracy as follows: ‘The prevailing consensus would seem to be that
politics is unimaginable without democracy, that it is only democracy
that opens up the possibility for politics. Without democracy, all we are
left with is (variously, or perhaps in combination) power, administra-
tion, fanaticism, hatred’.62
Just think, for instance, of the complexities and antagonisms attend-
ing the will to transform Iraq from authoritarian rule into a liberal dem-
ocratic non-secular state. Failure. This is the consensus. So where lurks
democracy? Similarly, though situated of course within a dramatically
different field of forces (political, economic, social, cultural, technical),
the translation of democracy into the social-technical form of the Inter-
net holds its own special problems. And these are all too frequently
overlooked, as if the institutional frameworks of the nation-state
contour seamlessly onto the Internet.
But there are other routes to thinking politics and institutional
forms. The appeal of politics without democracy rests precisely with
the potential for the political to refuse the passage of becoming insti-

40
 introduction

tuted within the state form. Politics then resides within a non- or post-
democratic politics, or politics unhinged from the theatre of
democracy.63 This does not eradicate the operation of institutions per se,
indeed my argument takes a completely opposite position. But it does
bring into sharp relief the limits of democracy as the only available
grammar for thinking processes of instituting politics within the social-
technical settings of network cultures.
There is a correlation here with Virno’s elliptical gestures to a ‘non-
state public sphere’, an extraparliamentary space of cooperation, shar-
ing, common resources, knowledge, customs, experiences and habits
that make possible a non-representative democracy that no longer sub-
mits to ‘the myths and rituals of sovereignty’.64 But Virno does not go so
far as dispensing with democracy. Instead, he speaks of a ‘non-represen-
tational democracy’, one that is decoupled from sovereign power. The
concept of organized networks is developed throughout this book in an
attempt to give a sense of an emerging institutional form within which
the organization of Net politics is partially autonomous from sovereign
control.
Despite the fact that the Net is far from resembling anything demo-
cratic, and along with the ambivalence I hold with the concept of
democracy, my decision to retain a meditation on the relation between
democracy and network cultures is also motivated by more practical
concerns. To adopt politics as the linguistic vessel of organization would
have required a substantial revision of the central argument, and in
ways that I can only foresee at this moment as uncertain. Democracy
remains, then, as an index of the passage of my thought on network
cultures over the past six years. There is also a question of creating
openings for readers into a text. To this end, democracy serves as a
mutable receptacle with which both the reader and this writer are able
to enter the politics of network cultures.

Diagram of Thought
Bringing together the conceptual insights into the philosophy and
history of technology and theories on the politics of social movements,
this book sets out to analyse how cultural practices associated with the
Internet can more properly be understood by examining specific geopo-
litical, social and economic conditions. The work of Dutch media theo-

41
organized networks

rist and activist Geert Lovink has informed much of my understanding

as well as experience of Net politics and culture. Similarly, Australian-
American media and cultural theorist McKenzie Wark has for many
years now been a benchmark for how to think and write media philoso-
phy. Lovink and Wark are a presence throughout this book, as is the
thought of friends and collaborators Brett Neilson, Soenke Zehle and
Danny Butt and the mailing lists of Fibreculture and Nettime. Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri’s passionate revival of an autonomist varia-
tion of Marxian political philosophy in their book Empire was a great
source of inspiration in the early stages of this book. In her review of
Empire, Benita Parry gently admonishes Hardt and Negri for their ‘dizzy-
ing conceptual promiscuity induced by the heady cocktail of Marxist,
autonomist and postmodern paradigms. In particular because the
Deleuzian notion of lines or paths of flight, of flows and borderless con-
tinuums is used as a trope of thinking processes and invoked as a tem-
plate of real world conditions, these disposals converge in an insouciant
disregard of the actually existing circumstances in what the authors in-
sist is a post-imperialist era’.65
This book could also be accused of perhaps not a dizzying, but proba-
bly a conceptually promiscuous combination of ‘Marxist, autonomist
and postmodern paradigms’, though I would phrase these lineages dif-
ferently. It also draws heavily on Deleuze, invoking notions of ‘continu-
ums’ in order to speak of ‘processes’, and then some more. At the level of
conceptual approach, this book mines a slightly different lineage with-
in Deleuze’s work, one that I think corresponds in a much more famil-
iar and conventional way with a Marxian approach that is concerned
with issues of uneven development and the politics of labour-power. By
drawing on the operation of a ‘constitutive outside’ in Deleuze’s work,
this book is able to furnish a much more identifiable bridge or connec-
tion with a Marxian tradition. The notion of a constitutive outside, for
instance, enables the conceptual passage of labour and its relation to or-
ganized networks within this book. While this book often makes refer-
ence to ‘a continuum of relations’ between that which has emerged and
the conditions of possibility – especially in its discussion of processual
media theory – it also insists that limits play an operative role in the for-
mation of relations. For example, in chapter 3 I question the notion of
‘immaterial labour’ and argue that disorganized labour more accurately

42
 introduction

describes the precarious condition of labour within informational

economies and the creative industries.
There can be little question that the shift from broadcast communi-
cations media to networked, digital communications media has enabled
a radical transformation in the ways in which social-technical relations
and modes of communication are organized within a capitalist system.
That much is obvious. The ongoing authority of the state, however, can
often seem less apparent within contemporary media-informational en-
vironments. Yet unlike what Hardt and Negri have often asserted, there
is a strong case for the ways in which the nation-state continues to play
a substantive role in regulating the movement of people and things.
This is not to ignore the considerable increase in the range of actors op-
erating across subnational, intra-regional and global scales. Rather, it is
to recognize that the transformation of the state is such that it frequent-
ly extends its authority beyond the territorial borders of the nation.66
And it does so precisely through its appeal to the sovereignty of the na-
tion-state. This is made most clear in the numerous conflicts surround-
ing issues of border control vis-à-vis trade and population flows across
the world.
Gramsci and Lenin do not feature in this book and they probably
should, since much of the concern here is with strategies and tech-
niques of organization. Though perhaps their absence is not so surpris-
ing. The argument for organization in this book is not premised on the
logic of the party. Indeed, this book is openly hostile to the cultural and
structural features of party politics. Moreover, it does not see the party
form as one that corresponds with the mode of communication pecu-
liar to networked technologies such as the Internet. This book under-
stands the possibility of organization as that which is immanent to the
media of communication. Such a focus was not the concern of Lenin or
Gramsci. And how could it have been? In their time, the party head-
quarters, the workers’ association, the factory and the streets were the
primary architectonic forms of communication. Today, that has all
changed. As such, the ways in which politics becomes organized has
also changed. New modes of communication necessitate new theoreti-
cal tools in order to make intelligible and actionable the ongoing force
of living labour.

43
organized networks

Citing David Harvey’s call for the need for a ‘socialist avant-garde’
to facilitate in the creation of ‘organizations, institutions, doctrines,
programs, formalized structures and the like’, both Parry and Harvey
remain wedded to a mode of political organization that is as utopian as
the charges levelled against Hardt and Negri.67 Parry and Harvey are
typical of a Marxian radical intelligentsia who, for all their attentive-
ness to the peculiarities of materiality, so often attribute so little signifi-
cance to perhaps the most important dimension to any form of organi-
zation: communication.
Political organization can never again take the form of a revived In-
ternationalist worker’s movement. Aside from the primacy granted to
class as the condition of possibility, Internationalism fails to compre-
hend one of the central lessons of Marxist analysis: the geography of un-
even development. The principle and material condition of uneven de-
velopment is nothing if it does not also take into account the situation
of communication. This is perhaps more so than ever, as communica-
tions technologies become the primary means by which production,
distribution and exchange are managed, to say nothing of social life.
From atms on every downtown street corner and village square to satel-
lite and radio navigation using Global Positioning Systems (gps) in agri-
culture industries and leisure cruise boats; from computer systems used
in finance modelling, online domestic banking and dating services, in-
formation technologies are common to the reproduction of capital and
the exploitation of labour-power. This book stages a series of interven-
tions into the parasitic logic of capital in the passionate belief that an-
other world is indeed possible. And it is the world we live, now.

44
Part i
1 Whose Democracy?
ngo s, Information Societies and
Non-Representative Democracy

The Network Problematic

A spectre is haunting this age of informationality – the spectre of
state sovereignty. As a modern technique of governance based on terri-
torial control, a ‘monopoly of violence’ and the capacity to regulate the
flow of goods, services and people, the sovereign power of the nation-
state is not yet ready to secede from the system of internationalism. The
compact of alliances among nation-states over matters of trade, security,
foreign aid, investment, and so forth, substantiates the ongoing rele-
vance of the state form in shaping the mobile life of people and things.
As the Internet gained purchase throughout the 1990s on the everyday
experiences of those living within advanced economies in particular,
the popular imagination became entranced by the promise of a ‘border-
less’ world of ‘frictionless capitalism’. Such a view is the doxa of many:
political philosophers, economists, international relations scholars,
politicians, ceos, activists, cyber-libertarians, advertising agencies, polit-
ical spin-doctors and ecologists all have their variation on the theme of
a postnational, global world-system inter-linked by informational
flows.
Just as the nation-state appears obsolete for many, so the term net-
work has become perhaps the most pervasive metaphor to describe a
range of phenomena, desires and practices in contemporary informa-
tion societies. The refrain one hears on networks in recent years goes
something like this: fluid, ephemeral, transitory, innovative, flowing,
non-linear, decentralized, value adding, creative, flexible, open, collabo-
rative, risk-taking, reflexive, informal, individualized, intense, transfor-
mative, and so on and so forth. Many of these words are used inter-
changeably as metaphors, concepts and descriptions. Increasingly, there
is a desperation evident in research on new information and communi-
cation technologies that manifests in the form of empirical research.
Paradoxically, much of this research consists of methods and epistemo-

46
 whose democracy?

logical frameworks that render the mobility and abstraction of informa-

tion in terms of stasis.
Governments have found that the network refrain appeals to their
neoliberal sensibilities, which search for new rhetorics to substitute the
elimination of state infrastructures with the logic of individualized self-
formation within Third Way style networks of ‘social capital’.1 Research
committees at university and national levels see networks as offering
the latest promise of an economic utopia in which research practice
synchronically models the dynamic movement of finance capital, yet so
often the outcomes of research ventures are based upon the reproduc-
tion of pre-existing research clusters and the maintenance of their
hegemony for institutions and individuals with ambitions of legitimacy
within the prevailing doxas. Telcos and cable tv ‘providers’ revel in
their capacity to flaunt a communications system that is less a network
than a heterogeneous mass of audiences-consumers-users connected by
the content and services of private media oligopolies. Activists pursue
techniques of simultaneous disaggregation and consolidation via
online organization in their efforts to mobilize opposition and actions
in the form of mutable affinities against the corporatization of everyday
life. The us military-entertainment complex enlists strategies of organ-
ized distribution of troops and weaponry on battlefields defined by
unpredictability and chaos, while maintaining the spectacle of control
across the vectors of news media. The standing reserve of human misery
sweeps up the remains of daily horror.
Theorists and artists of new media are not immune to these prevail-
ing discourses, and reproduce similar network homologies in their val-
orisation of open, decentralized, distributed, egalitarian and emergent
social-technical forms. In so doing, the discursive and social-technical
form of networks is attributed an ontological status. The so-called open-
ness, fluidity and contingency of networks is rendered in essentialist
terms that function to elide the complexities and contradictions that
comprise the uneven spatio-temporal dimensions and material prac-
tices of networks. Similarly, the force of the ‘constitutive outside’ is fre-
quently dismissed by media and cultural theorists in favour of delirious
discourses of openness and horizontality. Just as ‘immanence’ has been
a key metaphor to describe the logic of informationalization, so can it
be used to describe networks. To put it in a nutshell, the technics of net-

47
organized networks

works can be described as thus: if you can sketch a diagram of relations

in which connections are ‘external to their terms’ (Hume-Deleuze), then
you get a picture of a network model.
Whatever the peculiarities the network refrain may take, there is a
predominant tendency to overlook the ways in which networks are pro-
duced by regimes of power, economies of desire and the restless
rhythms of global capital. How, I wonder, might the antagonisms pecu-
liar to these varied and more often than not incommensurate political
situations of informationality be formulated in terms of a political theo-
ry of networks? From a theoretical and practical point of view, how
might organized networks be defined as new institutional forms of in-
formationalism? Given that institutions throughout history function to
organize social relations, what distinguishes the organized network as
an institution from its modern counterparts? Obviously there are differ-
ences along lines of horizontal versus vertical, distributed versus con-
tained, decentralized versus centralized, bureaucratic reason versus
database processing, and so on. But what else is there?
It is not sufficient to identify basic structural differences without
also attending to the ways in which network dynamics are conditioned
by the combinatory logic of ‘the political’ as it is shaped by materialities
of knowledge and modalities of expression. At stake here is a question
of epistemology and its conditions of possibility, of how techniques of
intelligibility are ordered and acquire variable layers of status and ca-
pacities to effect change. To this end, institutional settings function as
an enabling force. They provide a framework and set of resources from
which emergent idioms of expression can be organized in ways that of-
fer the possibility of sustainability and renewal – something that has
not, for instance, been a feature of most tactical media interventions.
And for this reason, I maintain that the primary political strategy for
networks at the current conjuncture is to engage in the invention of
new institutional forms. This chapter – and indeed, this book overall –
asserts the need for a strategic turn if network cultures are to address
the problematics of scale and sustainability: the situation of informational
politics.
The challenge for politically active network cultures is to make
strategic use of new communications media in order to create new insti-
tutions of possibility. Such social-technical formations will take on the

48
 whose democracy?

characteristics of organized networks – distributive, non-linear, situat-

ed, project-based – in order to create self-sustaining media-ecologies
that are simply not on the map of established political and cultural in-
stitutions. As Gary Genosko asserts, ‘the real task is to find the institu-
tional means to incarnate new modes of subjectification while simulta-
neously avoiding the slide into bureaucratic sclerosis’.2 Such a view also
augurs well for the life of networks as they subsist within the political
logic of informationality constituted by the force of the outside.

Networks and the Limits of Liberal Democracy

A network doesn’t come out of nowhere. One of the key challenges
networks present is the possibility of new institutional formations that
want to make a political, social and cultural difference within the so-
cial-technical logic of networks. It’s not yet clear what shape these insti-
tutions will take. To fall back into the crumbling security of traditional,
established institutions is not an option. The network logic is increas-
ingly the normative mode of organizing social-technical relations in
advanced economies, and this impacts upon both the urban and rural
poor within those countries as well as those in economically develop-
ing countries. So, the traditional institution is hardly a place of escape
for those wishing to hide from the logic of networks.
A degree of centralization and hierarchization seems essential for a
network to be characterized as organized. Can the network thus be char-
acterized as an ‘institution’, or might it need to acquire additional quali-
ties? Is institutional status even desirable for a network that aspires to
intervene in debates on critical Internet research and culture? How does
an organized network help us redefine our understanding of what an in-
stitution might become? Moreover, what is the political logic peculiar
to organized networks? These are the primary questions I address in
this section and in order to do this I develop the concept of non-repre-
sentative democracy via a critique of liberal democracy.
In her book The Democratic Paradox, Chantal Mouffe recapitulates the
key characteristics of modern democracy. The core values and ideas of
democracy consist of ‘equality, identity between governing and gov-
erned and popular sovereignty’.3 Modern democracy incorporated fea-
tures of the liberal tradition, which was characterized by ‘the rule of
law, the defence of human rights and the respect of individual liberty’.4

49
organized networks

Hence, the phrase liberal democracy. Representational democracy in the

form of democratically elected governments is the principal mode that
democracy has taken across the West. Popular sovereignty grants au-
thority to the discursive figure of ‘the people’. It is a mode of rule that
assumes a relationship rather than alienation between the people and
the state. Indeed, it assumes the people as citizens are at once represent-
ed by the state and at the same time protected by the functioning of the
state in so far as they constitute the very possibility of the state. Such a
notion has frequently been called into question, since it is predominant-
ly a myth. Who, for example, constitutes the figure of ‘the people’?
Women, children, minority peoples? Historically, the figure of the peo-
ple is underscored by a logic of exclusion, which in turn undermines
the legitimacy of popular sovereignty.
Liberal democracy is predicated on an articulation between a con-
stituency of citizens and elected representatives. This articulation has
eroded in recent years with the advent of the neoliberal state, which in-
culcates not so much citizens but consumer-clients into the corporate-
state nexus. The ambivalence that emerges around the composition of
political constituencies or subjectivities has been the topic of recent de-
bate associated with Italian political philosophers and activist move-
ments. Paolo Virno distinguishes between the ‘multitude’ (a plurality)
and the ‘people’ (a unity). He sees the former as the basis for a politics
that does not involve the transfer or delegation of power (decision-mak-
ing, for example) to the sovereign, which is the model of representative
politics through the mechanism of voting at elections. To varying de-
grees, such a model has functioned as a technique of organizing social
and economic relations within the architecture of the state. But to trans-
pose such a model over to ICT-based networks is necessarily weak, since
the architectonic arrangement is composed of very different variables,
dynamics, forces, spaces, temporalities and the like.
To put it bluntly, it is not possible to speak of democracy as a repre-
sentative, consensus-based politics in the environment of ICT-based
networks. To take one dominant example: in both a practical and theo-
retical sense, advocates of ‘e-democracy’ are investing in a phantasm
with their belief that the central principles of representative democracy
(citizenship, participation, equality, transparency, etcetera) can be
transposed into the realm of networks. For a start, citizenship is a con-

50
 whose democracy?

cept and practice co-emergent with the state form. Networks are not
states. Therefore in order to think democracy within networks, it is nec-
essary to develop in conceptual and practical ways idioms for non- or
post-representative democracy. Such a task does not abandon the con-
cept or possibility of democracy, but rather it recognizes democracy as
an ongoing project that, in a historical sense, is an idiom that has under-
gone numerous transformations. In order to develop a concept of non-
representative democracy immanent to networks of communication,
the work of Mouffe is, I think, helpful to engage, particularly in terms of
her elaboration of ‘the political’ as a field of antagonistic struggles.
Mouffe argues that agonistic democracy consists of that which ac-
knowledges the power-legitimation processes of ‘politics’ conditioned
by the possibility of ‘struggle between adversaries’ as distinct from the
illegitimacy within deliberative or Third Way rules of democracy that
refuse the ‘struggle between enemies’, which is special to antagonism
and ‘the violence that is inherent in sociability’.5 In her recent book, On
the Political, Mouffe both summarizes and develops her thesis on agonis-
tic democracy outlined in The Democratic Paradox.6 In The Democratic
Paradox, Mouffe presents a compelling (if somewhat repetitive) critique
of Third Way politics and rational consensus models of liberal democra-
cy (Habermas, Rawls) in terms of the fundamental contradictions with
those political idioms: namely, a rhetoric of tolerance and pluralism un-
derpinned by numerous forms and techniques of exclusion inherent
within rational consensus models of democracy. Mouffe argues that ra-
tional consensus, deliberative models of democracy ultimately fail due
to their disengagement with ‘the political’, or field of antagonisms that
underpin sociality. With Ernesto Laclau, her call has been for a radical
democracy – one that takes antagonism as a condition of possibility for
democracy. She argues for an agonistic process whereby a plurality of
interests, demands, discourses, practices and forces procure a space of
legitimacy whereby antagonisms are able to be addressed – not for the
purpose of transcendence or consensus, but for the purpose of acknowl-
edging that incommensurabilities and dissent are inherent to the poli-
tics of sociality.
My critique of Mouffe is based on the limits of her argument when it
comes to thinking politics in relation to networks articulated by digital
communications media or ICTs. Her model of radical democracy is

51
organized networks

premised on political institutions of the state as the primary institution-

al framework for addressing ‘the political’. How, though, might such a
model transpire in relation to organized networks? While I think these
networks can be called institutional forms in so far as they have a capac-
ity to organize social relations, they are radically dissimilar to the tech-
nics of modern institutional forms such as parliament and auxiliary in-
stitutions and departments. In this regard, the formation of organized
networks shares much with what Virno calls a ‘non-state public sphere’:
‘It is typical of the post-fordist multitude to provoke the collapse of po-
litical representation; not as an anarchist gesture, but as a realistic and
quiet search for political institutions that elude the myths and rituals of
sovereignty’.7
If Mouffe’s model of an agonistic democracy is to have any purchase
within networked, informational societies, then it is essential to address
the ways in which the organization of social-political relations within
such a terrain occurs within new institutional forms immanent to the
media vectors of communication, and thus sociality. Unless Mouffe’s
thesis is recast in ways that address the political situation of informa-
tional networks in terms of emergent institutions,8 her advancement
of an agonistic democracy whose condition of existence is premised on
the persistence of political institutional forms within the space of sec-
ond nature is one that will remain fixed within an image of nostalgia.
In effect, then, a process of translation is required in order to resituate
Mouffe’s agonistic model of adversaries within the ‘post-institutional’
terrain of networks. Such work can benefit from considering how
Mouffe’s notions of ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ operate as constitutive
forces within networks.
Networks are predisposed toward a grammar of uncertain potentiali-
ties. The traffic in expression across networks comprises the ontic level
of communication, which Mouffe and Laclau associate with ‘politics’ as
distinct from the ontological dimension of ‘the political’, which ‘con-
cerns the very way in which society is instituted’.9 The ensemble of
practices, actions and discourses – or what I am calling expression – is a
field of competing interests, desires and demands that undergo process-
es of translation of ‘the political’. Conflict and dispute are not excluded
from expression, as the deliberative model would have it, so much as
constitute the very possibility of expression. In a negative sense, the un-

52
 whose democracy?

certainty of networks arises in part from an incapacity to manage such

tensions. At this point the network may self-destruct.10 Mailing lists, for
example, are renowned for their inability to deal with the egoistically
motivated habits of ‘trolls’ whose primary mission is to exploit the vul-
nerability of list communities that aspire to principles of openness and
tolerance. These are nice virtues, but have proven time and again to be
barriers to decision-making. The deliberation that typically follows in-
terventions by trolls ends up being the focus of attention and does noth-
ing to advance any political or cultural project of networks. Frequently
list members will get bored and unsubscribe. Those lists that do under-
take online elections in an effective way – and here, I’m thinking of a
mailing list like the Association of Internet Researchers11 – do not re-
semble what I would call networks as political technologies and are
not the settings for engagements with adversaries as a process of social-
political transformation. Representative democracy in online settings
results in nothing more than the reproduction of a status quo.
The development of new institutional forms immanent to the media
of communication would, I maintain, provide a stabilizing effect for
networks in so far as a limit horizon is established that organizes the so-
ciality of networks in ways that go beyond the automated and encultur-
ated protocols and conventions one may associate with mailing lists, for
example. A limit horizon operates as a necessary antidote to the domi-
nant assumption (and indeed valorisation) of networks as spaces of flu-
id, ephemeral, fleeting association and exchange.12 Limits, moreover,
are established through the operation of the constitutive outside, which
is a process of engaging ‘the political’ as a complex of tensions through
which exteriorities (other networks, NGOs, universities, iprs, government
policies, exploitation of labour-power, geopolitics of information,
gender and ethnic differences, etcetera) are present within a network of
relations as an ‘affirmation of a difference’.13
In the case of organized networks this affirmation, however, is not as
Mouffe would have it ‘a precondition for the existence of any identity’,
since organized networks are not the kind of institutional forms that
correspond with ‘the creation of a “we”’, which is a collective identity
found in institutional settings such as the political party or social forms
such as ‘the people’. While I acknowledge Laclau’s understanding
(which Mouffe would share) of collective identities such as ‘the people’

53
organized networks

as ‘the emergence of a unity out of heterogeneity [which] presupposes

the establishment of equivalential logics and the production of empty
signifiers’14 – in other words, a complex of differential relations that co-
alesce as a unicity (‘chain of empty signifiers’) in order to stake out a dis-
tinction from that which is other – the organized network can never
correspond to the logic of ‘we’ or ‘unity’ precisely because it is a social-
technical form instituted through the logic of immanence and not the
logic of the kind of institution embodied in the party-political form of
the parliamentary system that Mouffe clings to as the form best able to
realize the liberal democratic project as one of democratic pluralism.
Mine is not a rejection of liberal democracy per se, but rather a recogni-
tion of its structural, material limits as a representational form and its
incompatibility with the technics of communication and the organiza-
tion of sociality as found in networks.15 That said, my position does
amount to a rejection if liberal democracy cannot undergo a transfor-
mation beyond a representational form.
In advocating an adversarial model of agonistic democracy, Mouffe
insists that ‘very important socio-economic and political transforma-
tions, with radical implications, are possible within the context of liber-
al democratic institutions’.16 In the case of networks we have already
gone beyond those settings and modes of social organization. Are we to
then abandon any project that seeks to institute networks as political
technologies? My argument, of course, is no. The challenge is to imag-
ine and enact a non-representative democracy whose technics of organ-
ization are internal to the logic of networks. Such a project calls for the
invention of new institutional forms external to the corporate-state ap-
paratus. These new forms are neither purely local, nor are they exclu-
sively global. Rather, they subsist as proliferating social-technical forms
between micro and macro dimensions of politics and territorial scales,
defining their limits according to the contingency of the event.
With organized networks there is no possibility of representational
democracy due to the architectonic properties of immanent forms of
social-political organization. Instead, we find the potential for post- or
non-representational forms of democracy. And contrary to Laclau’s ar-
gument against Hardt and Negri’s Empire, the logic of immanence does
not aim for a ‘universal desertion’ or ‘eclipse’ of politics in favour of some
kind post-political liberation.17 The logic of immanence does not negate

54
 whose democracy?

the role of externalities or ‘the exterior’. Externalities are elements that

coalesce as a concrete arrangement whose relations are conditioned by
the force of the constitutive outside. This is a process by which the po-
tentiality of immanence is actualized as particular forms and prac-
tices.18 Laclau is correct in his critique of Hardt and Negri’s claim that
with Empire there is ‘no more outside’ or external enemy and thus no
space of opposition,19 but he is mistaken, in my view, to assert that the
logic of immanence is unable to account for social antagonisms.20 Since
the constitutive outside is integral to the logic of immanence, so too is
the potentiality of tensions, struggles and conflicts as they emerge with-
in the plane of organization or actualization.
Similarly, non-representative democracy does not assume to have
eclipsed social antagonisms that underpin the field of ‘the political’. As
discussed above, the force of immanence as a population of potentiali-
ties is released through the operation of the constitutive outside. This
dynamic is comprised of tensions and conflict, and as such can be un-
derstood in terms of ‘the political’. Nor is non-representative democracy
equivalent to the ‘post-political’ perspectives advocated by theorists
such as Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash.21 Rather, non-
representative systems are conditioned simultaneously by the social-
technical impossibility of networks to represent and the decline of the
civil society-state relation as a complex of representative institutions
and procedures engaged in the management of labour-power and organ-
ization of social life. While networks may have members and partici-
pants, they do not have constituencies as such who are organized
around the logic of a body politic. There is no unity or identity such as
‘the people’ or, as Laclau would put it, no heterogeneity articulated as a
chain of equivalences that seeks to have its interests and demands rep-
resented by an individual or advocacy body. Individuals may choose to
contribute to the expansion and proliferation of the network, they may
subsist as potentialities waiting to become unleashed, and indeed they
may decide to institute representative mechanisms of governance. But
when this happens the network dissembles as a grammar of uncertainty
and evacuates the space of ‘the political’.
The concept of the organized network is also distinct from what
Mouffe terms ‘organized networks of global civil society and business’
undertaking the task of realizing a cosmopolitan democracy – a posi-

55
organized networks

tion that Mouffe critiques for its oversight of ‘the political’.22 Unlike the
global civil society networks described by Mouffe, organized networks
are not new global institutions, but more modestly and pragmatically,
new institutions whose technics are modulated by the spatio-temporal
dynamics of the network. As I go on to show in the section that follows
and the next chapter, the key model adopted by global civil society
movements has been that of ‘multi-stakeholderism’. This model, I ar-
gue, is incompatible with the logic of networks precisely because it is
predicated on the logic of representation.

Multi-stakeholderism and the Architecture of Net Politics

My basic argument is that networks are at a turning point and their
capacity to exist depends on developing technics of organization. And
it’s here that I think there may be opportunities for networks to lever
the discursive legitimacy that has arisen for civil society networks at
the World Summit on the Information Society (wsis). This is where
specific case studies of networks and how they are operating in a post-
wsis environment at subnational, transregional levels becomes helpful.
Those directly involved in project development – frequently NGOs – have
had much experience, but NGOs seem to be coming under increasing
pressure as they have moved into a more substantive role as political
actors within a neoliberal paradigm that grants legitimacy to those
who can function as ‘external providers’. The multi-stakeholder model
doesn’t seem to me to be one that enables networks (which I would
distinguish from NGOs) to negotiate the complexities of information
economies, societies, and the like.
After the closing ceremony of the wsis, the nagging question that
attends all summits remains largely unaddressed: what changes will
happen at local, subnational levels? The wsis process has resulted in
two key outcomes for civil society: 1) a hitherto non-existent discursive
legitimacy at the supranational level for civil society values, needs and
interests as they relate to the political economy and technics of ICTs,
and 2) a cache of resources for dealing with trans-institutional relations
made possible by the multi-stakeholderism experience. As I discuss in
greater detail in the next chapter, the primary post-wsis challenge will
be the extent to which NGOs and civil society movements are able to ex-
ploit the newfound discursive legitimacy at local, intra-regional levels.

56
 whose democracy?

At the scalar level, this is a process of renationalizing what at the

moment remains a denationalized discourse. Such a problematic is one
engaged by indigenous sovereignty movements and human rights
practitioners and advocates for many years now.23 In the case of the wsis
the difference is that the political economy of ICTs has expanded the
complexity of life understood as a communicative relation articulated
by media forms.
Since different institutions have different temporal rhythms, the
movement of discourse across institutional scales instantiates antago-
nisms peculiar to ‘the political’. Irrespective of whatever agreements are
made in the form of final recommendations, the fact remains that gov-
ernments are highly unlikely to legislate wsis policy because their bu-
reaucracies are unable to deal with the complexity of issues that have
emerged from the wsis debates. Perhaps there might have been more
concrete outcomes if the wsis debates had somehow restricted the dis-
cussion to technical issues alone, but that would require disassociating
technical issues from political and economic issues. Furthermore, any
national legislation that might eventuate from the wsis proceedings is
faced with the dilemma of policy that has already been made redundant
by economies of speed that attend the interrelations between techno-
logical innovation and social transformation.
What, then, is to be salvaged from the wsis for civil society, and what
is the relation to Net politics? For the most part, multi-stakeholderism
is celebrated as a form of democracy in action. Wolfgang Kleinwächter
captures the spirit of multi-stakeholderism:

The principle of Multistakeholderism is a new and innovative con-

cept for the global diplomacy of the 21st century. While the concept
as such is still vague and undefined, non-governmental stakeholders
from the private sector and from civil society are becoming step by
step an integral part of policy making in the information age. . . . The
wsis process has demonstrated that when the existing legal frame-
work has to be filled with new subject related global policies, a new
triangular relationship between governments, private sector and civ-
il society is emerging. These relationships are not hierarchical by na-
ture but will be organized in [the] form of networks around concrete
issues. It will depend from the concrete substance of an issue, how

57
organized networks

the triangular is designed and how relevant trilateral governance

mechanism will be organized.24

Absent from Kleinwächter’s formalistic celebration of multi-stake-

holderism is the unruliness of ‘the political’. Aligned with the politics of
advocacy, Kleinwächter is not able to address the tensions internal to
the logic of multi-stakeholderism as an architecture for relations be-
tween international and local NGOs and grassroots organizations.25
However effective multi-stakeholderism may be in policy-making for
an information society, such policy proposals are largely ineffectual un-
less they can infiltrate the complexity of institutions whose capacities
are organized according to incommensurate temporal speeds. Again,
this is a problematic of scale and translation.
Yet perhaps the success of multi-stakeholderism should be measured
as an accumulation of resources for negotiating issues among a range of
institutional, political and social actors, as Kleinwächter suggests? Such
an ambition is crucially dependent on the capacity of actors to collec-
tively retain institutional memories. Assuming individuals might tran-
scend their institutional codes of secrecy, such a feature long vacated
the realm of modern, industrial institutional forms of the state depart-
ment and corporate firm with the onset of post-Fordism and new forms
of flexible organization and mobility, to say nothing of the fragility of
networks and their general condition of disorganization.
Multi-stakeholderism is too closely aligned to the fantasies of delib-
erative, rational consensus forms of democracy. The emptiness of multi-
stakeholderism as an architecture of change invites new forms of man-
aging the politics of information. As I have been arguing, an alternative
model is beginning to emerge: that of the organized network, a form
whose logic of organization is internal to the dynamics of the media of
communication. Like the NGO, the organized network is expected to an-
swer to demands of transparency and accountability. Like the Internet,
the organized network is mistakenly assumed to adopt a decentralized,
horizontal, distributed structure of communication. The organized
network is antithetical to both of these presuppositions.
This is not to advocate some kind of return to the archaic form of
party-politics, as Zizek would have it. But it is to suggest that in order
for organized networks to undertake planning and development of proj-

58
 whose democracy?

ects and intervene in prevailing debates, a strategic – rather than tacti-

cal – architecture is required. This is where the issue of sustainability
transfigures both the discourse of development and the discourse of
networks. The politics of information is common to both these realms.
Sustainability requires a business model.26 NGOs have extensive experi-
ence at obtaining funding, much more so than networks associated
with tactical media activists. The latter, on the other hand, have a high
degree of media literacy vis-à-vis the political economy of information,
the programming of code, and the performance of critique from within
the spectacle of media systems. Collaboration between NGOs and tactical
media practitioners could be one of those instances of mutual benefit
and scalar enhancement.
While funding possibilities may arise from global relations in the
form of donors, business activities and aid, the social and political force
of networks is predominantly local or intra-regional. Herein lies a ten-
sion of translation internal to networks as they traverse scales for differ-
ent purposes. And this is where the demands of transparency, accounta-
bility and representation become distinct in the form of externally im-
posed conditions and internally generated expectations. The manage-
ment of these dual constituencies brings enormous pressure upon net-
works and highlights the manner in which ‘democracy’ has multiple
meanings determined by the situation of actors. Accommodating these
kinds of expectations and demands can absorb huge amounts of energy,
time and structural-technical reconfiguration (online voting anyone?).
Democracy, here, becomes equivalent to destruction.
Mechanisms of accountability and representation conflict with the
speed of capital, the flow of information and can slow the development
of projects. Yet they are also sources of trust – a key foundation of net-
works. Can trust, then, be constituted within non-representative social-
technical systems in alternative ways? Just as ‘democracy’ as a universal
principle is rendered dysfunctional when it meets the contingencies of
the particular, the question of trust can only be answered on a case by
case basis that considers the taxonomy of activities and relations pecu-
liar to any network. But taxonomies are also not enough. Networks can-
not be contained, even though they have limits. Similarly, trust cannot
be measured, and instead resonates as an indeterminacy within the fluc-
tuating rhythms of network ecologies.

59
organized networks

Any inquiry into, and active engagement with, democratic polities as

they emerge within informational network societies necessitates an en-
gagement with new social-technical relations that condition the possi-
bility of new institutional forms. This is a theme I develop in more de-
tail in the next chapter. But for now, it is germane to foreground the
limits of Laclau and Mouffe’s project of radical democracy in terms of
their foreclosure of both an institutional imagination and modes of ex-
pression. Part of the difficulty of transposing Laclau and Mouffe’s proj-
ect of radical democracy is one of translation. They focus almost exclu-
sively on discursive conditions as the basis of political expression. Here-
in lies a substantive limit to the possibility of a radical democracy with-
in media-information situations, where information is mobilized across
a range of social-technical institutional settings and user-networks, as
distinct from discourse, which is frequently embedded in traditional in-
stitutional forms. If democratic politics is contingent upon a functional
state infrastructure consisting of political institutions, does that mean
those countries without such infrastructures have abandoned the possi-
bility of democracy? In other words, how else might democracy be
thought in ways that do not conform to Western models of representa-
tive, liberal democracy? Moreover, what sort of purchase do new civil
societies, as articulated by new social movements and NGOs, have in the
formation of democratic polities? Is it even appropriate to continue
speaking of political projects with reference to the role of civil society,
which many commentators associate as a project peculiar to the mod-
ern era of democracy formation and the nation-state in the West? These
are question I address in the remainder of this chapter.

Scalar Tensions
In taking up roles that are traditionally the reserve of the state, NGOs
condition the possibility of three key features, all of which undermine
the economic and political sovereignty of emerging states. Firstly, the
logic of flexible production, accumulation and consumption that has
corresponded with the emergence of new ICTs and the capacity to
organize social relations in the form of networks has resulted in an
increasing liberalization of the state and the market. And with this
process liberalism is decoupled from democracy, where the latter
ensured a degree of transparency and accountability from the former.

60
 whose democracy?

Such features well and truly vanished with the onset of the ‘New Econo-
my’, as spectacularly demonstrated in the dubious accountancy meth-
ods of companies associated with the tech-wreck, Enron being the most
obvious example.27
Inflated economic returns in the form of debt management on the
balance sheet have been the basis for neoliberal states to secure their
ongoing pursuit of deregulation and privatization. Furthermore, hege-
monic states and the supranational organizations they are aligned with
have been unrelenting in imposing this structural logic of neoliberal-
ism upon developing states as a condition of receiving financial aid
from the imf, World Bank and private investors. In the case of develop-
ing states this has led to a range of structural conditions that emulate
some of the structural arrangements peculiar to neoliberal modes of or-
ganizing social relations, state bureaucracies and corporate practices.
The overwhelming consensus among critical international studies
scholars and political economists is that the imf/World Bank structural
adjustment programmes introduced in Sub-Saharan African countries
since the 1980s resulted in a 60 per cent decline in gross capital forma-
tion by the end of the decade.28 The unilinear flow of wealth from the
‘periphery’ to the ‘centre’ reproduces the patterns of growth that charac-
terized the nineteenth-century imperialist era of colonial economies.
As Ankie Hoogvelt writes:

Structural adjustment has tied the physical resources of Africa more

firmly into servicing the ‘old’ segment of the global economy. At the
same time, it has oiled the financial machinery by which wealth is
being transported out of the region, thereby removing the very re-
sources which are needed by the dynamic adjustment to the ‘new’
global economy.29

Within this sort of economic climate, developing states frequently lack

the financial resources necessary for establishing the institutional infra-
structures and social services that are conducive to civil society forma-
tions which, in the European experience, revolved around the forma-
tion of a domestic bourgeoisie that was coextensive with the project of
nation building. When the state has a limited structural relation to
civilian populations, then the constitutive dimensions of modern liber-

61
organized networks

al democracy are undermined. For example, the task of the modern uni-
versity corresponded with the project of nation building, of establishing
what Benedict Anderson called an ‘imagined community’. In modern
times, the university has been a key actor in the process of democracy
formation within the West. The university cultivated an informed and
knowledgeable bourgeoisie and citizenry, trained with the capacity to
deliberate over the political and social life of the nation. The university
also played a key role in the development of civil society in so far as it
occupied a critical space independent of the state. Today, of course, this
role has been seriously eroded as universities and academics working
within them are constituted within a neoliberal paradigm as ‘pseudo-
corporate’ institutions and ‘post-intellectuals’.30 Without these sorts of
experiences and histories, the project of democracy formation in devel-
oping states does not become irrelevant or impossible; rather, it be-
comes a question of how democracy might emerge with different prop-
erties and possibilities.
The sort of circumstances sketched above exacerbate the dependency
relation developing states have with foreign actors, including new
‘global civil society’ organizations such as NGOs.31 NGOs, for example,
often find themselves involved in activities in the realm of education,
providing training and literacy skills to local communities. Such activi-
ties may be secondary to the key mission of NGOs. As Rececca Knuth
notes with regard to information flows in ‘complex emergencies’: ‘There
is an acute awareness among relief organizations that short-term inter-
vention to save lives must be supplemented by long-term reconstruc-
tion initiatives that reconstitute local systems and prevent future
crises’.32 However, there is a high risk that such long-term initiatives be-
come fragmented and reproduced, at best, as a series of short-term inter-
ventions undertaken by an assortment of relief agencies in as much as
there is no guarantee that NGOs have either the financial resources or
enduring personnel to commit to long-term reconstruction projects.33
This predicament resonates for the situation of organized networks.
When NGOs become responsible for educating civilian populations an
almost perverse correlation with the civilizing mission of the colonizer
kicks in. Indeed, at a structural level NGOs occupy a similar territory as
transnational corporations (tncs), both of which contribute to a process
of recolonization of postcolonial states. This can result in tensions

62
 whose democracy?

between well-meaning NGOs and local populations over the kind of

political, social and cultural values attached to the techniques of educa-
tion. Moreover, the state foregoes the hegemonic process of negotiating
social-political values with civilian populations as they are articulated
through and within educational apparatuses. As such, a key dimension
of democracy formation is dispensed with.
Secondly, in adopting the task of educating civilian populations a
process is at work that is similar to the neoliberal technique of out-
sourcing. At a structural level, then, the state ‘leapfrogs’ straight into a
neoliberal frame, bypassing the temporal and spatial experiences of the
modern welfare state. In other words, developing states are structurally
positioned whether they like it or not in flexible modes of delivery,
hence creating a dependency relation on external providers as distinct
from domestically developed systems of learning and the social forma-
tions and cultural values that attend such processes.
In this sense, NGOs, when involved in auxiliary roles such as educa-
tion, undermine one of the traditional roles of the state. As such, NGOs
are assisting in the formation of conditions that also benefit the inter-
ests of tncs, which seek to obtain by any means possible conditions
that enable unilinear flows of capital, unrestricted by domestically
determined regulatory interventions by the state. Furthermore, the
presence of NGOs, as external providers of services that are traditionally
the reserve of the state, reinforces the sort of conditions associated with
imf and World Bank monetary loans and their structural adjustment
programmes. This raises serious questions with regard to NGOs that
claim to occupy an advocacy position on behalf of civilian interests. In-
deed, I would suggest that the very notion of civil society as a partially
autonomous space is brought into question as NGOs find themselves in a
paradoxical field of tensions in which they are at once bound to local
communities while assisting in direct and indirect ways the interests of
tncs and supranational governance.
A lively debate tracked this issue on the nettime mailing list in Feb-
ruary 1997, with a number of postings critiquing the Soros network and
the interrelationships between NGOs, corporations and civil society.34
Some of the issues and critiques from that time were synthesized in an
interview with Saskia Sassen by Geert Lovink in 1999. On the issue of
accountability, Lovink noted that ‘One of the problems of NGOs – espe-

63
organized networks

cially if they are linked to large international organizations – is that for

people on the ground, and even for governments, they are no longer ac-
countable for what they do. They can move very quickly and in many
ways can behave like finance capital’.35 In this sense, NGOs again can be
seen to model some of the dynamics of tncs and reproduce techniques
of organization peculiar to neoliberalism.36 Deconstructing the ques-
tion of accountability, Sassen importantly notes:

[A]ccountable to what and for what? In some cases, the fact that
some of these organizations are not accountable is actually better,
because it means that a different kind of political project can be
enacted – whereas if an organization is accountable, it often means
being accountable to existing value systems, which in some cases
are the very ones best avoided. However, many of the big NGOs are
profoundly accountable – by which I mean they are accountable in
the kinds of ways and to the kinds of entities one might not want to
demand accountability for or to.

Then, relating the question back to her own research on the architec-
ture of global finance and the need to ‘invent new systems for accounta-
bility and accountability for different kinds of aims in some of these sys-
tems’, Sassen elaborates the problematic of ‘transparency’:

There is an architecture, there are certain standards the players ad-

here to; and there is transparency, the famous term ‘transparency’,
which implies something that’s intrinsically good. But what is it? It
is accountability to shareholders and their short-term profit. But do
we always want this kind of accountability? No – including from
global finance – so we’re presented with the challenge of discovering
new types of accountability, new ways of thinking the question of ac-
countability – accountability to a larger public good, and so on.

For the purposes of this chapter, I want to highlight that while NGOs may
procure tactical benefits from an absence of accountability, this has to
be weighed against the correspondence such a system of organization
has with informational secrecy by corporations. The consequence of

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 whose democracy?

this is fundamentally antithetical to the ‘transparency’ assumed of

conventional notions of democracy.
Thirdly, the sidelining of the state is also significant at a political lev-
el, since there is no institutional residue or collective memory of things
being otherwise, at least in terms of the presence of state political insti-
tutions. And at an imaginary level, the possibility of different forms of
political organization that correspond with the space of the nation is
not there. While the neoliberal state has seen the erosion of traditional
differences between the Left and the Right and the emergence of Third
Way style politics, I think it is premature to overlook the political func-
tion of pseudo-corporate institutions such as the university and the per-
sistence of trade unions: these are institutions that are part of a collec-
tive residual memory that contribute to what Ghassan Hage has called
the possibility of spaces of hope.37 Having said this, I wouldn’t want to
rule out the potential for alternative political models emerging from in-
digenous modes of political organization.
In short, I hope the above examples illustrate the paradoxical role of
NGOs within quasi-states: probably against their best wishes, NGOs are of-
ten situated in such a way that they assist the imposition of neoliberal
systems of organization upon developing states. As such, these states
are occluded from the sort of modernizing experiences and processes –
its times and its spaces – that have been fundamental to the constitu-
tion of liberal democracy in the West. I will return to the question of
democracy in the final section of this chapter, once I establish the politi-
cal role of intellectual property rights for developing states and their
civilian populations.

Information Flows, Intellectual Property and Economic Development

With the advent of new ICTs, particularly the Internet, NGOs have been
able to consolidate and expand themselves, creating new alliances by
networking with each other through distributed information flows.
As I noted earlier, the rise of NGOs has coincided with the emergence of
globalized economies. Similarly, the Internet has enabled NGOs to inter-
face with local, state, military and supranational entities. This might
give the impression that distinctions in scale disappear, and that ten-
sions between and within these sectors no longer prevail. Certainly this
is not the case, since NGOs often enough contest the powers of the state

65
organized networks

in the interests of the ‘the people’ (a politically dubious figure at best).

With their enhanced capacity to gather and disseminate information,
NGOs have obtained greater legitimacy as political actors, often challeng-
ing the sovereignty of authoritarian governments.38 The horizontal
expansion of informational flows has led a number of scholars to claim
that a new state form has emerged – a form which Castells has termed
the ‘network state’, one that international relations theorist Martin
Shaw calls the ‘global state’,39 and a form that Hardt and Negri attribute
to the ‘post-political’ manifestation of ‘Empire’.
The extent to which such a new state form can be called democratic
is highly questionable, however. Moreover, such a form has not fared
well for communicative relations for those civilian populations de-
prived of adequate it infrastructures; nor should an intensification in
informational flows be assumed to correspond with open systems of
communication. The commercialization of the Internet and its regula-
tion via intellectual property regimes functions to close information
flows. But as I argue below, depending on the extent of reform, iprs can
be used as a strategic political architecture that maintains the flow of
information within informal networks, while at the same time securing
a closure against external exploitation. By informal networks I wish to
acknowledge the ways in which information flows are governed, for
example, by customary law, which in itself is a highly formal system,
but it can be considered as informal in the sense that I invoke it here:
that is, at a discursive level such informal systems are constituted as il-
legitimate in so far as they hold little political and legal purchase within
systems of international and national law. The case of Africa is again in-
structive in terms of illuminating some of the assumptions surrounding
ICTs as the generator of economic development.
By the late 1990s, the relatively dismal Internet connection rate for
African states prompted Castells to make the pretty obvious point that
‘Most of Africa is being left in a technological apartheid . . .’.40 Such a
condition has been compounded by economic circumstances, with a
steady decline in economic growth in Africa throughout the 1990s, ac-
companied by substantial drops in the levels of Foreign Direct Invest-
ment (fdi). As Hoogvelt notes, ‘Africa’s share of all fdi flows to develop-
ing countries has dropped from 13 per cent in 1980 to less that 5 per
cent in the late 1990s’.41 Encouraged by the privatization and deregula-

66
 whose democracy?

tion of telecommunications industries, fdi has been on the rise in recent

years. Mobile phone usage and Internet connection rates have also in-
creased considerably. Yet the combination of foreign investment and
unfettered market access and trade liberalization is not without prob-
lems for domestic economies and infrastructures. Referring to the crises
in Asian ‘tiger’ economies in the late 1990s, a report in the International
Herald Tribune in 2002 noted that high levels of foreign investment
flows are no a priori guarantee to fast-tracking economic development:
‘developing countries that allow an inflow of foreign money into their
financial markets are vulnerable to disastrous, panicky withdrawals,
especially if they have not developed sound banking systems first’.42
Such an observation remains just as pertinent today.
As much as there might be what ICT for development discourse likes
to call a ‘technological leap’ under way in Africa, this is no guarantee
that individuals and communities possess the means to function within
informational or knowledge economies in which knowledge and ideas
are ‘embodied in products, processes and organisations’, which in turn
‘fuel development’.43 Such a move requires a vast educational infra-
structure and cultural apparatuses and industries if information is to be
codified in symbolic forms as knowledge. It also requires investment in
‘sustaining the physical state of human capital (health expenditure)’.44
Furthermore, such investment and infrastructural needs have implica-
tions for democracy formation, since the figure of the politically en-
abled citizen presupposes an educated and healthy civilian; thus infor-
mation flows depend upon a civic infrastructure that includes schools,
technical colleges, universities, library resources, and so forth. One im-
portant precursor if not parallel to such infrastructure consists of ensur-
ing that indigenous cultural production and biological knowledge is
not alienated from local communities and individuals.
While intellectual property regimes can be understood as a form of
abstraction that alienates labour from production, this is not necessari-
ly a contradiction in terms when iprs are considered as a strategy to en-
sure a degree of economic and political self-determination by indige-
nous peoples and those living in developing or quasi-states. Intellectual
property rights enable developing states to place an economic value and
regime of scarcity on their cultural and biological resources. New ICTs
are the mechanism for then distributing this property and extracting

67
organized networks

financial remuneration from its use by those participating in informa-

tional economies.
Furthermore, the codification of production as property reinforces
the legal authority of the state, since property cannot exist independ-
ently of state recognition.45 That is, iprs can assist in the development of
the state apparatuses, albeit ones that are circumscribed by economic
interests, and reinstate their authority to legislate progressive policy
related to the privacy rights of their constituents.46 While intellectual
property in and of itself does not alleviate poverty or misery, it does
provide a crucial potential for leverage out of such conditions, certainly
more so than if ip is handed over to tncs that have a monopoly on
ownership of both technology and product patents and copyright of
cultural production.
Of course there are numerous issues and problems associated with
intellectual property regimes as they currently figure. Intellectual prop-
erty law reinforces what Castells identifies as a key characteristic of the
‘information age as a result of its networking form of organization’:
namely, ‘the growing individualization of labor’,47 and this functions to
undermine collective bargaining or the regulation of labour and wages
by agreements between unions and the state. As I have discussed else-
where, intellectual property regimes still attribute proprietary rights to
an individual, rather than a collective.48 In this regard, ip does not
favour the social form of production peculiar to many indigenous peo-
ples and people in the developing world, where production occurs
through the form of the collective and regulated within customary
law.49 Further reform needs to occur to current intellectual property
law that legitimates ownership of knowledge that is not fixed in form,
and enables indigenous intellectual property to be protected in perpetu-
ity. Herein lies a challenge for NGOs at policy and legal levels.

Conclusion
In this chapter I have questioned the extent to which Mouffe’s
concept of agonistic or pluralist democracy as a politics of legitimacy
that enables ‘the struggle between adversaries’ rather than antagonistic
struggles between enemies is relevant in any pragmatic sense within an
informational age of network societies. Certainly, Mouffe’s identifica-
tion of the antagonistic dimension of ‘the political’ as that which is

68
 whose democracy?

underscored by the ineradicability of violence, following the work of

Carl Schmitt and others, is insightful and timely as rational consensus
models have gained even greater purchase as the only legitimate
models of democracy in town. But how, I have wondered, is an agonistic
politics to be conditioned within the logic of informationalism?
The ‘postnational’ ideological terrain of network societies has seen
the apparatuses of the state undergo deregulation and privatization, or,
in the case of developing states, simply bypassed altogether. Mouffe’s
model of agonistic democracy, which is predicated on traditional insti-
tutions of the state as the place in which a democratic polity unfolds,
seems problematic and decidedly modern in light of the reconfigura-
tion of statehood at extraterritorial and networked dimensions. Howev-
er, my argument in this chapter is that it is precisely through pursuing
ip rights for indigenous peoples and civilian populations in quasi-states
that an agonistic politics might unfold. My reasoning behind this is that
iprs constitute a hegemonic field of articulation of ‘the political’ in
which the identities of states, peoples, NGOs, corporations and suprana-
tional entities are contested and reconstituted in ways that challenge a
neoliberal order as it currently stands (for instance the imposition of
structural adjustment reforms on developing states by the imf and
World Bank as the condition for financial aid). To avoid engaging with
the problematic of iprs is not a political alternative.
The auxiliary task for NGOs is to ensure that the people they represent
are able to be situated as political actors within this networked terrain.
Such networks, as suggested by Florian Schneider, might be considered
as ‘packets in agony’.50 Political legitimacy, I would suggest, is condi-
tioned in the first instance by indigenous peoples obtaining economic
sovereignty which in turn positions them as political actors in as much
as informational flows across scalar dimensions and the expansion of
capital depends upon engaging with what is otherwise a community of
others excluded from informational economies and network societies.
Given the high uncertainty of the state form within developing coun-
tries such as those in Africa, I have argued that democracy needs to be
rethought in terms of non-representational politics as it figures within
the emergent institutional form of organized networks.

69
2 The World Summit
on the Information Society and Organized Networks
as New Civil Society Movements

There is no question that non-governmental organizations have more

often than not played vital roles in fulfilling a range of humanitarian re-
lated tasks in numerous countries that have been subject to the ravages
of colonialism, environmental disasters, agricultural failure, civil wars
and genocide, internal political and social instability, currency crises, or
a combination of all of these. In many instances, NGOs have filled a gap
in the vacuum within developing, transitionary or ‘quasi-states’ who,
for various reasons, do not have the capacity to provide political infra-
structures and social services for their populations. As a result, NGOs
entrench an extant condition whereby developing states may often not
be equipped with the sort of institutional infrastructures and social-po-
litical formations – namely, a domestic capitalist bourgeoisie and civil
society traditions – that have enabled the formation of democracy with-
in the project of nation building, as witnessed in the West.1 As such,
many developing states do not have the sort of structural conditions in
place to experience the unfolding of modernity. Or rather, in a dialecti-
cal sense, these states have indeed experienced forms of modernity that
are radically dissimilar in spatio-temporal and ontological ways from
that experienced by and within Western countries, many of which have
adopted liberal democratic political cultures along with the political
economies that attend such frameworks within a capitalist system.
In many respects, the material conditions of developing states have
enabled the possibility of a range of conditions and experiences in ad-
vanced economies that could be considered as privileges constituted by
legitimately enacted violence. Mary Kaldor notes that war and violence
are both primary conditions for sustaining a civil society: ‘What Nor-
bert Elias called the “civilizing process” – the removal of violence from
everyday life within the boundaries of the state – was based on the es-
tablishment of monopolies of violence and taxation’.2 A monopoly of
violence concentrates ‘the means of violence in the hands of the state
in order to remove violence from domestic relations’.3 ‘Modern sover-

70
 the world summit

eignty’, write Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, ‘was thus meant to ban
war from the internal, civil terrain’.4
The capture of violence by the state enables civil society to develop
its key values of trust, civility, individual autonomy, and so forth,
though within the framework of the rule of law as it is administered by
the state. Moreover, the state’s monopoly of violence minimizes,
though never completely eliminates, politically subversive elements
and the possibility of civil war arising from within the territory of the
nation. At a global level, the perversity of hegemonic states possessing
a monopoly of violence operates as the basis upon which territorial sov-
ereignty is maintained by way of subjecting violence upon alien states
and their populations. A large part of this experience can be accounted
for by referring to the histories of colonialism – a project whereby impe-
rial states are able to secure the material resources and imaginary di-
mensions necessary for their own consolidation and prosperity.
Combining Hegel’s thesis on the passage of nature/civil society/state
with Foucault’s notion of governmental power (the biopolitical, inter-
penetrative ‘conduct of conduct’), political philosopher and literary
theorist Hardt defines civil society in its modern incarnation in terms
of its capacity to organize abstract labour through the governmental
techniques of education, training and discipline:

Civil society . . . is central to a form of rule, or government, as Fou-

cault says, that focuses, on the one hand, on the identity of the citi-
zen and the process of civilization and, on the other hand, on the or-
ganization of abstract labor. These processes are variously conceived
as education, training, or discipline, but what remains common is
the active engagement with social forces (through either mediation
or production) to order social identities within the context of institu-
tions.5

With the governmentalization of the field of the social, a special rela-

tionship between civil society and the state is effected, one in which dis-
tinctions between institutions of the state and those of civil society are
indiscernible, and where intersections and connections are diagram-
matic. What, however, has happened to this constitutive relationship
within our current era, one in which these sorts of relationships have

71
organized networks

undergone a crisis as a result of new socio-economic forces that go by

the name of neoliberalism? What sort of new institutions are best suit-
ed to the organization of social relations and creative labour within an
informational paradigm? And what bearing, if any, do they have on
inter-state and supranational regimes of governance and control?
In short, how do civil society movements articulate their values and
how do they procure a multi-scalar legitimacy once the constitutive re-
lationship between civil society and the state has shifted as the nation-
state transmogrifies into a corporate state (or, in the case of developing
countries, a state that is subject, for instance, to the structural adjust-
ment conditions set by entities such as the World Bank and wto)?
Clearly, civil society values have not disappeared; nonetheless, the tradi-
tional modern constitutive framework has changed. Increasingly, civil
society values are immanent to the social-technical movements of net-
works. Issues of governance, I would suggest, are thus best addressed by
paying attention to the technics of communication. In the case of the
wsis project, this means shifting the debate from the ‘multi-stakeholder
approach’ – which takes bureaucratically organized institutions (or net-
worked organizations) as its point of departure – to one which places
greater attention to the conditions of tension and dissonance as they
figure with ‘the political’ of informationality. In other words, a focus on
the materialities of networks and the ways in which they operate as
self-organizing systems would reveal quite different articulations that,
in my view, more accurately reflect the composition of sociality within
an information society.
Within a neoliberal paradigm we have witnessed what Hardt and
Negri term ‘a withering of civil society’ in which the structures and in-
stitutions that played the role of mediation between capital and the
state have been progressively undermined. This shift has been enabled
by the logic of deregulation and privatization, which has seen, in some
respects, the social-political power of both state and non-state institu-
tions decline.6 These include institutions such as the university, health
care, unions and independent mainstream media. For Hardt and Negri,
the possibility of liberal democracy is seriously challenged by the
hegemony of neoliberalism – or what they prefer to call the imperial,
biopolitical and supranational power of ‘Empire’7 – since it threatens if
not entirely eradicates traditional institutions of representation and

72
 the world summit

mediation between citizens and the state. As Hardt and Negri write in
their book Empire:

[T]his withering can be grasped clearly in terms of the decline of the

dialectic between the capitalist state and labor, that is, in the decline
of the effectiveness and role of unions, the decline of collective bar-
gaining with labor, and the decline of the representation of labor in
the constitution. The withering of civil society might also be recog-
nized as concomitant with the passage from disciplinary society to
the society of control.8

The society of control is accompanied by techniques of data surveil-

lance such as cookies, authcate passwords, data mining of individuals
and their informational traces, cctvs that monitor the movement of
bodies in public and private spaces, and so forth. Some of these are relat-
ed to the governance of intellectual property. New information and
communication technologies thus play a key role in maintaining a con-
trol society. In an age of network societies and informational
economies, civil society, or rather civil societies, have not so much disap-
peared as become reconfigured within this new social-technical terrain
in order to address problems immanent to the social, political and eco-
nomic situation of mediatized life. Civil society, as it is resides within
an informational plane of abstraction, continues to act as a key counter-
force to and mediator between the state and capital. Thus, civil society
does not entirely disappear or become destroyed with the onset of ne-
oliberalism from around the 1970s-’80s. Rather, there has been a main-
tenance of civil society within our current network societies precisely
because there has been a social desire and need to do so.
While such a claim may appear self-evident, it is instructive to recall
that civil society was a European invention that emerged alongside the
modern state and capital.9 In its modern form, civil society mediated
between the interests of capital and the coercive powers of the state.
The modern form of democracy is predicated on the notion and exis-
tence of a civil society. The two are mutually constitutive formations.
Civil society functioned as a space of voluntary association and open ex-
pression. The values of civil society – ‘civility’, respect for individual au-
tonomy and privacy, trust among peoples, removal of fear and violence

73
organized networks

from everyday life, and so forth – operated as a counterpoint to the rules

and purposes of the state whose centralized political authority adminis-
tered the lives of people within a given territory.10 The state played the
role of ensuring that those values were maintained through structures
of governance and the law. Civil society was articulated to the state by
the media – primarily newspapers – and as such, was able to play a role
in regulating the conduct of the state. This was a hugely significant
shift, at least while the distinctions between the state and the public
sphere of civil society remained intact.
My argument is that with the onset of neoliberalism and the trans-
mogrification of the state, civil society also undergoes a change. For ex-
ample, the extent to which civil society plays the traditional role of me-
diating between the interests of capital and state is now highly ques-
tionable. With the alliance between the state and capital – as seen in the
many instances of corporate welfarism, where in order to attract foreign
investment, the state effectively subsidizes corporations in the form of
r&d, tax incentives, cheap land leases, bankruptcy bailouts, etcetera –
civil society organizations are also repositioned. This is most clear in in-
stances where civil society organizations fulfil the role of service
providers – a task traditionally undertaken by government depart-
ments, particularly during the time of the welfare state. With the shift
into a neoliberal paradigm come new expectations of civil society. New
rules are inscribed upon civil society organizations. The increasing fre-
quency of so-called liberal democratic governments engaging in the
routine practice of misleading parliament and the populations whose
interests they are supposedly representing is paralleled by greater de-
mands for transparency and accountability on the part of civil society
organizations. As I go on to discuss, the occasion of wsis also creates
a space for new civil society actors.
The emergent civil society movements go beyond satisfying the self-
interest of individuals, as represented by consumer lobby groups, for ex-
ample. Instead, they derive their affective and political power from a
combination of formal and informal networks of relations. Think, for
instance, of the effect the no-border refugee advocacy groups have had
as observers of human rights violations administered by the state.
Whether one is for or against the incorporation of ‘illegal immigrants’
into the nation-state is secondary to the fact that civil society coalitions

74
 the world summit

of activists, religious organizations and social justice advocates have

played a primary role in constituting what Raymond Williams termed
an emergent ‘structure of feeling’,11 or what can be thought of as the
social-technical organization of affect, that counters the cynical oppor-
tunism of populist conservative governments.
In an in-depth report entitled Appropriating the Internet for Social
Change, Mark Surman and Katherine Reilly examine the strategic ways
in which civil society movements are using networked technologies.12
They identify four major online activities: collaboration, publishing,
mobilization and observation. These activities are mapped along two
axes: formal versus informal and distributed versus centralized (Figure
1). Collaborative filtering and collaborative publishing, for instance, fall
within the formal/distributed quadrant. Open publishing, mailing lists,
research networks and collective blogs are located within the distrib-
uted/informal quadrant; personal blogs within the centralized/informal
quadrant; and organizational web site development, online petitions,
online fundraising, e-membership databases and e-newsletters fall with-
in the formal/centralized quadrant. Surman and Reilly consider the
‘tools that fall in the formal/centralized quadrant to be used primarily
by large NGOs, unions and political parties’.13 The logic of organization,
production and distribution is, according to Surman and Reilly, ‘based
on a “broadcast” model’ of communication. The distributed/informal
quadrant, on the other hand, is more typical of activities undertaken by
‘informal social movements, research networks and “virtual organiza-
tions”’.
In this chapter I will argue that it is time for ‘informal social move-
ments’ and ‘virtual organizations’ – or what I prefer to call ‘organized
networks’ – to make a strategic turn and begin to scale up their opera-
tions in ways that would situate them within the formal/centralized
quadrant, but in such a manner that retains their informal, distributed
and tactical capacities.14 The participation of civil society actors in de-
bates and policy development associated with wsis provides one exam-
ple of how such a scalar shift can occur. There are also problems with
such shifts in scale, particularly at the level of institutional composi-
tion, as I will go on to discuss.
This chapter assesses Phase 1 of the World Summit on the Informa-
tion Society (wsis) that culminated in Geneva, 2003.15 Phase 2 of the

75
organized networks

Strategic uses spectrum

Formal

Online
Collaborative Organizational fundraising
publishing web site

Intranets
Collaborative Filtering E-membership
databases
Online
petitions

E-newsletters
RSS
Distributed Centralized
Research
networks Collective
blogs
Mailing
lists
Open source
intelligence
P2P
Personal
Open blogs
publishing
Newsgroups
(historical)
Informal

1. Strategic uses spectrum, Surman and Reilly, 2003

wsis process focussed less on the form of participation of civil society in

the information society, and more on public policy issues associated
with Internet governance. Debates often became highly technical but
ultimately no less separable from matters concerning infrastructure, ac-
cess and participation, regulation, etcetera. The un Working Group on
Internet Governance (wgig) was one of the key bodies responsible for
reporting to the wsis Phase 2 process.16 With disputes among various
representatives over issues such as domain names, root servers, ip ad-
dresses, spectrum allocation, software licensing and intellectual proper-

76
 the world summit

ty rights, both phases of the Summit demonstrated that the architecture

of information is a hugely contested area. As evidenced in official wsis
documents, consensus between governments, civil society groups, NGOs
and corporations over these issues is impossible. Representation at the
Summit itself was a problem for many civil society groups and NGOs.
As a un initiative geared toward addressing the need for access to ICTs,
particularly for developing countries, the problem of basic infrastruc-
ture needs such as adequate electricity supply, education and equip-
ment requirements were not sufficiently addressed. Funding, of course,
is another key issue and topic of disagreement.
Against this background, this chapter argues that the question of
scale is a central condition to the obtainment and redefinition of
democracy. Moreover, what models of democracy are global entities
such as the wsis aspiring to when they formulate future directions for
informational policy? Given the crisis of legitimacy of rational consen-
sus, deliberative models of democracy, this chapter argues that democ-
racy within information societies needs to be rethought in terms of or-
ganized networks of communication that condition the possibility of
new institutions that are attentive to problems of scale. Such a view
does not preclude informational networks that operate across a range
of scales, from subnational to intraregional to supranational; rather, it
suggests that new institutional forms that can organize social-technical
relations in ways that address specific needs, desires and interests are
a key to obtaining informational democracy.
As noted in the previous chapter, the ‘multi-stakeholder’ approach,
as adopted in the wsis process through the principle of bottom-up par-
ticipation and inclusion of civil society organizations in processes of de-
cision-making with governments and businesses, in and of itself cannot
fulfil the objective of, for example, ‘an inclusive Information Society’, as
proposed in the official Plan of Action.17 Despite the various problems
associated with the wsis, my argument is that it presents an important
strategic opportunity for civil society movements: the ‘denationalized’
political legitimacy obtained at wsis can, I would suggest, be deployed
to political and economic advantage in the process of re-nationalization
or re-localization. The emergence of organized networks as new institu-
tional forms are best suited to the process of advancing the ambitions of
wsis.

77
organized networks

Global Governance and the World Summit on the Information Society

The wsis’s two-stage meetings in Geneva, 2003, and Tunisia, 2005,
exemplify the ways in which the political, social, economic and cultural
dimensions of information and communication technologies afford civ-
il society movements a political legitimacy in developments associated
with issues of global governance that has hitherto been exclusive to
supranational actors and multilateral institutions such as the wto, the
World Bank, imf, the G8 nations, the un, the oecd, apec, asean, nafta, and
so forth. As the ‘information society’ has extended beyond the reserve of
rich nations or advanced economies, actors such as the World Intellec-
tual Property Organization (wipo) and the Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers (icann) have emerged as institutions
responsible for establishing common standards or information architec-
tures that enable information to flow in relatively smooth, ordered and
stable ways. Such entities have often been charged as benign advocates
of neoliberal interests, as represented by powerful nation-states and
corporations. As a un initiative organized by the International Tele-
communications Union (itu), the wsis has also been perceived by many
as a further extension of neoliberal agendas into the realm of civil
society. As Sasha Costanza-Chock reported in May 2003:

[T]he itu has always served governments and the powerful telecom
conglomerates. Originally set up in 1865 to regulate telegraph stan-
dards, later radio, and then satellite orbit allocation, the itu took on
the Summit because it has recently been losing power to the tele-
coms that increasingly set their own rules and to the Internet Corpo-
ration for Assigned Names and Numbers (icann), which was created
by the us government to regulate the Internet domain name system.
The itu is now facing heavy budget cuts and is desperate to remain a
player in the global regulation of Information and Communication
Technologies (ICTs).18

The neoliberal disposition of itu is further evidenced by the primacy

given at the wsis to issues such as cybercrime, security and electronic
surveillance, taxation, ip protection, digital piracy and privacy.19 The
itu’s support of a summit concerned with bringing civil society move-
ments into the decision-making process of global information gover-

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 the world summit

nance is one that is preconditioned by the empty centre of neoliberal-

ism, which has seen governments in advanced economies reincorporat-
ing civil society actors and social organizations into matters of social
welfare in the form of ‘service providers’. Within a neoliberal frame-
work, the interest of government and the business sector in civil society
is underpinned by the appeal of civil society as a source of unregulated
labour-power. This new axis of articulating civil society organizations
through the logic of service provision functions to conflate ‘civil socie-
ty’ with the ‘private sector’. Such a conflation blurs or obscures what
had previously been clear demarcations at the level of subjectivities,
value systems and institutional practices. The conflation of civil society
and the private sector is evident in much of the government documen-
tation from the wsis. In some ways this points to the multidimensional
aspects of civil society – no longer can civil society be assumed to reside
outside of market relations, for instance. In other ways, it raises the
question of legitimacy: can civil society be ‘trusted’ when its condition
of existence overlaps with market interests and needs of the private sec-
tor? Similarly, can the private sector be embraced by ‘the Left’ when the
former displays credentials as a ‘corporate-friendly citizen’? Indeed,
what might ‘citizenship’ mean within a global framework? And then
there is the mutually enhancing or legitimizing function that such a
convergence of actors produces: both civil society organizations and the
private sector expand the discursive platforms upon which they stake
out their respective claims. Ambiguities such as these point to the in-
creasing complexity of relations between institutions, politics, the econ-
omy and sociality.
There’s an urgent need to think through these issues and enact prac-
tices that go beyond the cynicism of Third Way-style approaches to pol-
itics. The Third Way, as adopted in the mid-1990s by Blair, Clinton,
Schroeder and others since, is nothing but the expansion of market
forces into social and cultural domains that hitherto held a degree of
autonomy in terms of their articulation of different regimes of value.
Moreover, there is a need for a radical pragmatism that engages civil so-
ciety movements with economic possibilities in such a way that main-
tains a plurality of political ideologies, from Left to Right; this is some-
thing Third Way politics has undermined, the result being extremist
manifestations of populist fundamentalism on both the Left and Right,

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but without the political institutions or processes to articulate their in-

terests. The proliferation of terror is, in part, a symptom of this collapse
in politics, a collapse which refuses the antagonisms that underpin the
field of ‘the political’, and thus results in a situation whereby actors that
might otherwise be adversaries instead become enemies. Since the an-
tagonisms prevailing within information societies tend to be seen as
distractions or debilitating to the wsis project, I have doubts about the
extent to which the ‘multi-stakeholder’ approach goes beyond some of
the tenets of Third Way politics. Let us remember that communication
systems are conditioned by the dissonance of information, or what Bate-
son termed ‘the difference which makes a difference’.
In an optimistic light, the ‘multi-stakeholder’ approach adopted at
the wsis is indicative of a period of transition within supranational in-
stitutions. Yet paradoxically, the efforts of the itu/un to include civil so-
ciety movements in the decision-making process surrounding global
governance of the information society is evidence of the increasing inef-
fectiveness of supranational governing and policy development bodies.
The United State’s cynicism and self-interest in bypassing the authority
of the un during the Iraq war and the breakdown of wto summits in a
post-Seattle climate of ‘anti-globalization’ protests are two extremes
that point to the waning effectiveness of supranational institutions to
address governance issues through international mechanisms. The ex-
panding division and inequality in living and working conditions
between the global North and the global South after successive wto
meetings and rounds of international agreements on trade liberaliza-
tion is further evidence of the incapacity of supranational institutions
to address the complexities of global governance.
In the case of the wsis, Costanza-Cook maintains that the itu’s
decision to organize the Summit was partly motivated by their fear of
redundancy as a governing body within an information society. Such a
view is reiterated by Steve Cisler in his account of the tensions between
icann and itu at the wsis:

itu members like France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom long resis-
ted the Internet. They were pushing Minitel, isdn. African members
saw (rightfully) how disruptive the Internet could be and resisted it.

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The itu was shocked by the growth of the Internet, and they have
belatedly wanted to ‘control’ it. The failed wsis proposal [to shift
Internet governance away from wipo] is just the latest attempt. Of
course during this growing awareness of the importance of the Inter-
net, the composition of the itu has changed from almost exclusively
government telcos (or ptt’s) to a mix of old style government monop-
olies, dual government-private, and straight corporate telephone
companies.20

icann is a us government authorized non-profit corporation that is re-

sponsible for managing various technical aspects associated with Inter-
net governance. These include ‘Internet Protocol (ip) address space allo-
cation, protocol identifier assignment, generic (gtld) and country code
(cctld) Top-Level Domain name system management [.com., .net, .org,
and so forth], and root server system management functions’.21 The role
of icann in Internet governance was disputed at the wsis for a range of
reasons. In his informative report commissioned by one of the more
dominant civil society lobby groups at the wsis, the Association for
Progressive Communications (apc), Adam Peake unravels the debates
that took place throughout the wsis process about the role of icann in
relation to issue of Internet governance. Peake notes that many were
concerned that of the 13 Root Servers around the world that install all
‘top level’ domain name system (dns) servers, ten of these are located in
the usa.22 It becomes clear that at the level of technical infrastructure,
the vertical stratification of the Net is shaped by geopolitical, economic
and cultural interests. This tendency towards the vertical organization
of information and its protocols rubs against the grain of efforts by civil
society and open source movements to ‘democratize’ information and
enhance the horizontalization of information management.23
Alternative systems such as Anycast, which enable root servers ‘to be
“cloned” in multiple locations’, were proposed and implemented
throughout the 2003 planning process of wsis.24 In other words, region-
al as distinct from us concentrated root servers are possible and came
into effect in early 2003, but these only mirror or copy the us root
servers and thus are not autonomously controlled.25 Nevertheless, such
alternatives begin to alleviate the concern that various civil society and
government stakeholders had with respect to a perception that icann

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operates in the interests of maintaining a us control of the Internet, or at

least supports the bias toward us Internet usage as represented by the
location of root servers whose close geographic proximity to us-based
users supports rapid response times on the Net.26
More significant concerns were raised about the gatekeeping role
played by icann and the us government over the allocation of a coun-
try’s top-level domain names. This was seen as undermining national
sovereign control over domain names. Moreover, there is serious con-
cern that the us Department of Commerce can potentially ‘remove a
country from the root, and therefore remove it from the Internet’.27
It doesn’t take much to imagine the devastating effect of removing a
cctld in times of military and information warfare: a country’s entire
digital communications system is rendered useless in such an event,
and social and economic impacts would come into rapid effect. A more
likely scenario would see the us government intervening in the alloca-
tion of cctlds in instances of political or economic dispute. In this re-
gard, the control of top-level domain names operates as a potential form
of economic sanction or a real technique of unilinear leverage in busi-
ness and political negotiations.
The other significant player in relation to this discussion of the wsis
is wipo and their role in the global governance of information flows.
wipo is a un agency with a mandate to ‘harmonize’ intellectual property
rights across member states. In 1995 wipo made an agreement with the
wto to assist in facilitating the implementation of the trips agreement
across member states. More recently, wipo’s harmonization of patent
law has been criticized for the way it restricts the degree of flexibility
for and imposes substantial financial burdens on developing coun-
tries.28 In a report written by Carlos Correa for the South Centre inter-
governmental organization for developing countries, the following
risks and asymmetrical aspects of wipo’s Patent Agenda for developing
countries were summarized as follows:

[H]armonized standards would leave little room for developing coun-

tries to adapt their patent laws to local conditions and needs; harmo-
nization would take place at the highest level of protection (based on
standards currently applied by developed countries, especially the
United States and Western European countries) meaning that the

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process will exert an upward force on national laws and policies in

developing countries resulting in stronger and more expansive rights
of the patent holders with the corresponding narrowing of limita-
tions and exceptions. Such higher standards are unlikely to have a
positive effect on local innovation in developing countries; and also
the danger that the current draft contains standards that are primari-
ly aimed at benefiting the ‘international industries’ and not individ-
ual inventors or small and medium size enterprises.29

Since it holds no legal authority at the national level, wipo has frequent-
ly been cast by critics as an ineffective institution, although this is
always going to be the case for a supranational institution whose legiti-
macy is as strong as the responsiveness to iprs by member states. In in-
stances where intellectual property protection is violated within na-
tional industries, as in the case of ongoing digital piracy of film and soft-
ware within countries such as China, the lack of legal authority by wipo
is potentially offset by the mechanism of economic sanctions that can
be imposed by adjacent supranational institutions and multilateral
entities. A more substantial criticism of wipo concerns its largely
negative response to the issue of open source software and collaborative
information flows which are best suited to developing countries with-
out the financial resources to adopt proprietary informational systems.
Thus the relationship wipo holds with civil society movements and
advocates of open source software and ‘open development’ is often
underpinned by conflicts in interest. Furthermore, the relationship
between wipo and the wto casts the un in the questionable role of
advocating corporate interests over those of civil society.
This very brief overview of wipo and some of the key issues associat-
ed with information architectures and the complex structural and in-
stitutional relationships begins to raise the question of what the rela-
tionship between global citizenship and Internet governance might
mean within information societies. With stakeholders from civil socie-
ty organizations, government and the private sectors, wsis was never
going to succeed as a global forum that seeks to be inclusive of diversity
and difference if it was just going to focus on technical issues associated
with Internet governance. The expansion of the debate on Internet gov-
ernance, ICTs and issues of access and technical infrastructure to include

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civil society issues such as sustainability, funding, education, health,

labour conditions and human rights functioned to sideline any centrali-
ty that icann and wipo may have sought to hold during the Summit.
Many of the un principles on human rights, for example, migrated into
the Civil Society Declaration that came out of the Summit.30 But like
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), it is only as strong as
the resolve of member states to ratify and uphold such principles with-
in national legislative and legal frameworks.
The complexities of the wsis process exceed the possibility of en-
gaging their diversity. While the rhetoric has been one of inclusiveness,
the experience for many working within civil society movements and
the private sector has been a frustrating one. As Peake writes during one
of the prepcom meetings leading up the December Summit in Geneva:

For those who don’t know how wsis works – everything happens at
very short notice, situations have to be reacted to immediately, and it
is very difficult for civil society to respond with the transparency and
inclusiveness that we would hope. There simply is never time.

I have one major concern. We should be very careful about how we

raise issues around Internet governance in the wsis process. We
(civil society, private sector, Internet users) have a very weak voice in
the process. wsis is run by the States. Our only opportunity to speak,
with *no* guarantee of being listened to, is in 1 or at best 2 10
minute sessions each day. itu are the secretariat of the process and so
have a very direct role in drafting text and framing arguments for the
States to consider.31

Critical Internet researchers have also had cautious words to say about
the extent to which the civil society activists – or what many now refer
to as the ‘multitudes’, or movement of movements – can expect to make
a substantial impact on the wsis process. Again, the diversity of stake-
holders and their competing interests brings in to question the ambi-
tions of the ‘multi-stakeholder’ approach. If dissonance is taken as the
condition of informationality, as distinct from deliberation and consen-
sus as idealistic outcomes, then we begin to orient ourselves around the
possibility of ‘non-representative’ systems of organizing social-technical

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relations. Co-moderator of the nettime mailing list, Ted Byfield, gives

his perspective in a posting in March, 2003 – around the time the itu
began to soften its tone of market-oriented, technical-driven solutions
to Internet governance:

my own view is that the activists who think the itu/wsis process is
just another three- or four-letter target for generic social-justice de-
mands should be much more sensitive to the context. . . . the logic of
‘multitudes’ may not be representative, but the logic of monolithic
organizations (at best) *is* representative, so it would be a mistake to
assume that the delirious logic of the movement of movements will
somehow transform the itu into some groovy, polyvocal provision-
alism. it won’t. one of the most ‘progressive’ things the wsis process
can accomplish is to minimize the scope of itu activities. cookie-
cutter activist demands will inevitably put pressure on the itu to
expand its purview – and provide a pseudo-legitimating cover for
such expansions. this would NOT be a good thing.32

As it turned out, the Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action articu-

late exactly what Byfield fears: lip service to concerns of civil society
movements, which are beyond the scope of the bureaucratically driven
governance structures of nation-states, who are incapable of dealing
with complex social and cultural issues.33 This situation inevitably re-
sulted in a Tunis 2005 Summit that skirted around the serial incapacity
of participating governments to implement many, if any, of the recom-
mendations proposed in the Plan of Action. Perhaps the best thing the
wsis could have done is stick with a relatively limited agenda. In a post-
wsis environment, this might mean keeping the debate on the informa-
tion society focussed on limited technical and legal issues – policy
domains that nation-states do have some capacity to at least administer.
It would, however, be a disaster to see Internet governance shifted in
any exclusive way into the regulatory domain of nation-states. It is un-
clear at a technical level how necessary it is for a supranational, global
institution to be steering Internet governance issues. The question that
persisted throughout wsis was whether icann is the body best suited to
this task.

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It was inevitable that the broad, inclusive ambitions of the wsis at the
end of the day turned into a rhetorical machine. While this has meant
that civil society movements have obtained a degree of legitimacy at
a supranational, institutional level, it is highly doubtful whether the
wsis itself is able to turn the tables on the broad and complex social
situations that inter-relate with ICTs. The legitimacy obtained by civil
society movements involved in the wsis process can be transferred as
political and symbolic leverage within other, more focussed platforms
at national and translocal levels. This process of a re-nationalization of
the discursive legitimacy of civil society concerns and values is the next
challenge.
All of this background summary, necessarily brief as I have present-
ed it, finally brings me to the crux of my argument in this chapter:
democracy within an informational society is challenged, perhaps more
than anything, by the problematic of scale and the ways in which cum-
bersome, top-heavy and bureaucratic-driven supranational institutions
involved in issues of global governance are frequently going to fail.
From the wsis fora emerges a pattern indicating that governing institu-
tions have substantial limits in terms of policy development that acts as
a driver of democratic change. Such a problematic is partly one of scale.
It also has much to do with the correspondence between institutional
temporalities and the limits of practice. The temporal rhythms of the
networked organization, as distinct from organized networks, are
simply not well suited to the complexities of social-technical relations
as they manifest within informational societies. Despite the impact of
post-Fordist techniques of reorganizing institutional relations and
modes of production, the networked organization persists as the domi-
nant environment within which sociality is arranged. Such institution-
al formations will only continue to struggle to keep apace with the
speed of transformation and the contingencies of uncertainty peculiar
to the informatization of social relations.
The regimes of value internal to the operation of organized net-
works, as distinct from networked organizations, are only just begin-
ning to surface. In the case of organized networks, discourses, practices
and values are coextensive with the media of communication in the
first instance. Networked organizations, by contrast, are a predominant-
ly modern, industrial institutional form. Hence, the role of communica-

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tions media is secondary to the technics of organization instantiated

through the architectonics of bricks and mortar.
In a most reductive sense, the vertical systems of communication
within modern institutional forms are the primary reason why so many
institutions have had difficulties with the transition into network
societies. The tcp/ip (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol)
standards for the Internet enable distributed, horizontal forms of com-
munication. This is in contrast to the domain name system (dns), which
functions as the vertical axis of governance for digital technologies
using tcp/ip standards. Thus the kind of disputes and tensions that
have developed out of the wsis process, and debates around Internet
governance more broadly, are substantially different from those found
among institutions that operate historically within a modern institu-
tional system.
Put simply, the scene of ‘the political’ in the case of organized net-
works is coextensive with the media of communication, whereas the
boundaries of ‘the political’ do not extend to those modern institutional
forms that have been forced to upgrade their networking capacities.
Moreover, the gap between these two institutional dynamics is an ex-
emplary instance of what Jean-François Lyotard has called ‘the dif-
férend’, or ‘phrases of dispute’.34
In other words, there’s a need to think democracy beyond the idiom
of representation and consensus – two of the basic principles which
have been carried over to the multi-stakeholder model of managing pol-
icy debates among government, business and civil society stakeholders
at the World Summit on the Information Society. NGOs are also expected
to adopt such practices, along with those of accountability and trans-
parency. Again, my view is that such primary components of represen-
tative democracy in its state form do not correspond with the dynamics
of networks, hence the need for a non-representative idiom of democra-
cy. What the particularities of such a model might consist of is going to
vary according to situation, needs, forces, processes, interests, demands
and so on of specific networks, but at the same time they are going to be
affected by larger macro and structural forces associated with the politi-
cal economy of ICTs and policies around Internet governance.
One could hypothesize that the ideology of neoliberalism is sympto-
matic of the problem of institutional forms within a networked, infor-

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mational paradigm. Neoliberalism is responsive to the problematic of

governance in an informatized society that has seen an intensification
of abstraction in systems of production and social life. Organized net-
works emerge within a neoliberal era of governance, yet at the structur-
al level they present the horizon of post-neoliberalism, since their tech-
nics of communication and organization are beyond the reformist agen-
da associated with neoliberal governance. As new institutional forms,
organized networks create the possibility of new subjectivities that do
not correspond with the modern politico-economic subjects of either
the citizen or the consumer. Similarly, the concept and social-technical
form of organized networks invites a rethinking of notions of civil soci-
ety. Issues such as these will only become amplified as the logic of or-
ganized networks materializes as a new institutional form.

Institutional Scale and the Technics of Governance

At best, the ‘informational citizen’ is one who has recourse to repre-
sentative systems of governance adopted by liberal democratic nation-
states. But it’s well and truly time to invent new post-political, non-rep-
resentative models of democracy. The crisis of liberal democracy across
the West over the last 20 to 30 years is carried over to the debates occa-
sioned by the wsis. The distributive, non-linear capacity of the Internet
shapes social-technical relations and information and knowledge
economies in ways that do not correspond with the old, hierarchical
structures and governance processes peculiar to the modern era. The
challenge of organization and governance is intrinsically bound to the
informatization of the social. Representative models of democracy do
not correspond with this situation.
While it may appear as just an institution whose exclusive responsi-
bility concerns technical architectures of Internet governance, the case
of icann points to more substantial matters associated with models of
global governance within an age of networks. Described by some as
‘an experiment in democratic governance on a global scale’,35 icann
embodies many of the challenges facing organized networks, both in
terms of how they understand themselves and how they function.
The contest over icann’s monopoly of Internet governance – as raised by
civil society concerns at wsis, the interests of the itu as a new player in
Net governance, and the ambitions of the EU as a ‘second-tier’ super-state

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– signals not just the difficulties associated with multi-stakeholder ap-

proaches to governance; more than anything, the icann story points to
the profound mistake in assuming the Net can reproduce the pillars of
‘democracy’ in its idealized ‘Westphalian international order’.36 John
Palfrey charts the history of icann and what he sees as its imminent
demise. icann, he writes, ‘sought to empower the Internet user commu-
nity, including the private sector, to manage a system necessary for
the stable operation of the Internet’.37 So far so good. Things became
unstuck, however, at a structural level in terms of incorporating a range
of stakeholders into the decision-making process of icann:

Its novel, though ultimately flawed, structure has enabled a coalition

of private-sector interest groups to manage the domain name system
(‘dns’) with broad input from individual users and limited but grow-
ing input from nation states. However, icann has failed to attract and
incorporate sufficient public involvement to serve as the blueprint
for building legitimacy through the Internet. Those who sought
through icann to prove a point about democracy have misplaced
their emphasis, because icann’s narrow technical mandate has not
lent itself to broad-based public involvement in the decision-making
process.38

And:

icann has sought to legitimate itself as an open and representative

body, striving toward a bottom-up decision-making process ground-
ed in consensus and inclusion.39

The online global election in 2000 of five ‘At Large’ members of the 19-
member directorship is a great example of the mistaken understanding
of what constitutes a representative polity within a global information
society that is defined, from the outset, by an uneven geography of in-
formation. Who, for instance, are the elected five members (to say noth-
ing of the 14 unelected members) supposed to represent? Their nation-
state of origin? A particular set of issues? And, to recall Negri, who is
‘the public’ that participates in such events? These are all questions that
lead to one conclusion: attempts at reproducing a modern socio-tech-

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nics of representative democracy within an informational plane of ab-

straction can only result in failure. The valorisation of ‘openness’ is not
a particularly helpful libertarian mantra to maintain when dealing with
the uneven geography of information.40
For example, many libertarians and activists insist that intellectual
property laws should be universally abolished, since ip inscribes a
regime of scarcity upon that which is digitally encoded and thus re-
mains undiminished at the level of form when it is reproduced and dis-
tributed. Certainly, there are strong reasons to support such a position.
There is a great need to combat the substantial financial and legal barri-
ers that emerge with accessing information and knowledge resources
associated with patents for agricultural development and vaccinations.
However, there are many factors overlooked in any blanket approach to
the problem of intellectual property. While I would advocate the hack-
er ethic of sharing resources, too often the material preconditions neces-
sary for participation in such open systems of distribution are left unad-
dressed, or simply assumed as a given.
In case we’ve forgotten, such speculative discourses are ones associat-
ed with the ‘New Economy’, and we saw what that amounted to when
the dotcom bubble burst and nasdaq high-tech stocks crashed in April
2000: a spectacular tech-wreck that resulted in pretty much instant
bankruptcy and overnight unemployment for many.41 The religious
faith that it development is synonymous with instant and sustainable
growth was certainly brought into question with the massive devalua-
tion of dotcoms and telcos. But one could be forgiven for wondering if
the monumental tech-wreck ever happened. Government and educa-
tion institutions have been particularly slow to awaken to the fact of
the nasdaq collapse. The rhetoric of ‘e-solutions’ as the answer to all
problems continues to run thick in these places. Part of the reason for
this has to do with the way in which the deregulation of many govern-
ment and education institutions has followed on from the deregulation
and privatization of telcos and the media industries, which was fuelled
by the market hype of what critical Internet theorist Geert Lovink calls
‘dotcom mania’. In other words, the ongoing hype generated out of the
it sector seems to be the only discursive framework available for coun-
tries enmeshed in the neoliberal paradigm, be they advanced economies
in the West or countries undergoing a ‘leap-frogging’ of modernity.

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While the wsis forums have been successful in generating a new

legitimacy for civil society values, too often one is reminded of the
deeply unimaginative ideas driving the ambition for an inclusive
information society.
Jeanette Hofmann – one of the elected At Large members of icann –
recounts a key problem confronting organizations as they scale up their
level of operations. Speaking of the paradox that comes with obtaining
legitimacy within international institutions, Hofmann observes: ‘As
soon as civil society organizations assume formal roles in international
forums, their representativeness and legitimacy are also called into
question. Ironically, NGOs are charged with the democratic deficit they
once set out to elevate’.42 This notion of a ‘democratic deficit’ can be ex-
tended to the Association for Progressive Communications,43 who have
been one of the peak lobby groups within the Internet governance and
communication rights debates associated with wsis. The effect of an in-
creased institutional and discursive visibility is, of course, conditioned
by an increased marginalization of other civil society actors. Again,
this points to the limits and problem of politics that operates within a
representative framework, which the apc presupposes as its mandate of
governance. The apc story is also symptomatic of the structural logic of
political pragmatism within a multi-stakeholder, trans-scalar suprana-
tional policy forum such as wsis.
As I am arguing in this chapter, it is time to invent non- or post-rep-
resentative modalities of organization, as distinct from representative
idioms of governance. In this way, the technics of communication is
granted the kind of primacy that corresponds with the informatization
of sociality. Moreover, the disjuncture between, if you will, the signifier
and signified (or speaking positions) is sidelined in favour of collabora-
tive and distributive technics of composition. Don’t get me wrong, in no
way am I proposing some kind of naïve ‘ideal speech act’ here. There
should be no illusion that distributive networks are somehow free from
vertical systems of organization, be they symbolic or material. Rather,
the technics of communication within a digital era do not correspond
with the kind of institutional arrangements that persist within debates
on the information society and presupposed in the multi-stakeholder
approach of wsis. These kinds of institutions can be understood as net-

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worked organizations. They are clumsy when it comes to the manage-

ment of information.
icann faced a similar difficulty to that of civil society organizations,
as identified by Hofmann. But what I’ve been suggesting is that the
problematic of ‘democratic practice’ goes beyond the level of discursive
legitimacy. More fundamentally, there is a problem with the way in
which principles of democracy peculiar to the modern state system are
translated into the social-technical environment of the Internet. The re-
sult is always going to be failure. Completely new understandings of or-
ganizational structures, practices and political concepts are called for
with the emergence of organized networks in order to create value sys-
tems and platforms of legitimacy that are internal to networks. As I
briefly sketch in my concluding comments to this chapter and develop
in more detail in this book’s final chapter, the concept of a ‘processual
democracy’ offers one possibility for exploring alternative political for-
mations that are attentive to the ways in which practice is situated
within the media of communication.
The case of icann serves as a parallel instantiation of the kind of
governance problematics faced throughout the stages of wsis. The wsis
process embodied a shift in relations between the un and non-state
actors, which, for the past decade or so had been characterized by a ‘top-
down’ approach by which the un engaged NGOs. In their report on the
wsis for the Social Science Research Council, New York, Claudia
Padovani and Arjuna Tuzzi consider such a mode of governance as
‘institutional’.44 By contrast, they see the ‘bottom-up’ or ‘globalization
from below’ approach at the wsis as a challenge to earlier relations
between the un and civil society actors. Both, they argue, were operating
during the wsis and the two year lead up of preparatory committee
meetings (PrepComs), regional conferences and follow-up meetings.
At a reductive level, the differences between these two approaches
are apparent in the range of documentation and critical responses to
come out of the Summit. The two approaches are most clearly delineat-
ed in their articulation of values and modes or processes of governance.
In terms of values, the institutional approach embodied by government
and business representatives was predominantly interested in market-
based and technically-oriented solutions to ICTs and their relationship to
issues of global governance. In effect, government and business partici-

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pants reproduce the neoliberal paradigm that has dominated the past
two decades of government policy-making in the West. Here, one finds
the international lingua franca of policy that adopts an instrumentalist
faith and technologically determinist simplicity to the uneven and
situated problems of social, cultural and economic development.
For example, in the government Plan of Action there is an emphasis
on technical infrastructures and informational access functioning as
the primary enabling devices for ‘universal education’ and ‘lifelong
learning’. This sort of Third Way rhetoric is further compounded in the
Plan of Action’s discourse on ‘capacity building’ – a phrase shared
among a range of wsis stakeholders and common to many civil society
organizations, but one that is understood in terms of ‘e-learning’ and
‘distance education’ in the Plan of Action. Such phrases are firmly
entrenched within neoliberal discourses that understand education as
a unilinear, hypodermic communication process driven by service
providers operating under the auspices of imperialist political
economies. Within a dotcom paradigm, such discourses amount to no
more than boosterism for the it sector.45 The economic and political
pressures faced by the university sector in the West contribute to a de-
pendency relationship within indigenous education systems in devel-
oping countries. ‘E-learning’ and ‘distance education’ are heavily pro-
moted as the financial panacea for cash-strapped universities in the
West, and the ‘consumer’ of such projects frequently consists of coun-
tries without nationally developed educational infrastructures. The
need by developing countries for external providers of education is then
often used as the justification for developing it infrastructures. Educa-
tion becomes subject in the first instance to the interests of market
economies, and policy developments associated with civic values are
then articulated in economistic terms. Throughout the Plan of Action,
policy initiatives are driven by the capacity for governments to index
access against targets and performance indicators. Such a technique of
governance and decision-making is symptomatic of the limits of supra-
national entities to deal with complexity and functions to give the false
impression of ‘demonstrable outcomes’.
The ‘bottom-up’ approach, as represented by civil society organiza-
tions, NGOs and activists, was much more concerned with ensuring
that social and cultural priorities were embraced in the Declaration of

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Principles and Plan of Action. Civil society movements have been effec-
tive in shifting the wsis agenda from a neoliberal, technologically deter-
minist set of proposals to a more broad understanding of an informa-
tion society that is preconditioned by the materialities of communica-
tion. The ‘multi-stakeholder’ approach that emerged out of the wsis
meetings has enabled issues of concern to civil society movements to
migrate into the field of supranational policy-making. The primary doc-
uments produced are clear on one thing – a technological fix to social
and economic problems is not going to work.
The reason such a ‘discourse war’ between top-down and bottom-up
approaches to information governance was so significant is that the
success of the wsis process in ensuring a ‘social justice and develop-
ment’ agenda for civil societies and their relationship with ICTs in many
ways rests with governments adopting the principles and proposals out-
lined in the official documentation. Many oral and written submissions
to the drafting of the official Declaration of Principles and Plan of
Action were left out of the final documents. The decoupling of ‘macro’
and ‘micro’ actors was further reflected in the Summit itself, with
activists, grassroots organizations and NGOs running meetings and work-
shops in parallel to the official un programme for the Geneva meeting.
Padovani and Tuzzi suggest a much more overlapping approach charac-
terized the Summit.46 Certainly, the wsis has presented its own peculiar-
ities with regard to the problematics of process, decision-making and
identification of key issues.47 But one should not see the wsis as excep-
tional or unique in terms of organizing a range of stakeholders around
a particular theme or issue perceived as having international signifi-
cance. The un, after all, has a history of hosting approximately one sum-
mit per year since the 1992 Earth Summit (Conference on Environment
and Development) in Rio de Janeiro.48
It would thus be a mistake to see the ‘multi-stakeholder’ approach to
governance at the supranational level as exceptional. Arguably, all sum-
mits have had to address the challenge of managing a range of stake-
holders and their competing interests and situations. What distinguish-
es the wsis from previous summits is the ways in which the process of
informatization has interpenetrated the organization of social relations,
economic modes of production and systems of communication. Such a
situation does indeed call for new models of governance, but whether

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the idea of ‘multi-stakeholder governance’ in and of itself is sufficient to

the task of social-technical complexity is, I would suggest, doubtful.
A substantial challenge to this model consists of the highly variable
dimensions of power and its operation across a range of scales and a
diversity of actors. As Padovani and Tuzzi maintain, ‘the “multi-stake-
holder approach” is not yet a model and needs to be defined, not only in
theory but in practice, taking into consideration the nature and level of
power the different stakeholders can exercise’.

Conclusion
It is time to abandon the illusion that the myths of representational
democracy might somehow be transferred and realized within net-
worked settings. That is not going to happen. After all, the people bene-
fiting from such endeavours as the World Summit of the Information
Society are, for the most part, those on the speaking and funding cir-
cuits, not people who are supposedly represented in such a process.
Business and government representatives were quite clear that civil
society was not to be taken seriously. Networks call for a new logics of
politics, not just based on a handpicked collection of NGOs that have
identified themselves as ‘global civil society’.49
Networks are not institutions of representative democracy, despite
the frequency with which they are expected to model themselves on
such failed institutions. Instead, there is a search for ‘post-democratic’
models of decision-making that avoid classic models of representation
and related identity policies. The emerging theme of non-representa-
tional democracies places an emphasis on process over its after-effect,
consensus. Certainly, there’s something attractive in process-oriented
forms of governance. But ultimately the process model is about as sus-
tainable as an earthworks sculpture burrowed into a patch of dirt called
the 1970s. Process is fine as far as it integrates a plurality of forces into
the network. But the primary questions remain: Where does it go? How
long does it last? Why do it in the first place? But also: Who is speaking?
And: Why bother? A focus on the vital forces that constitute social-tech-
nical life is thus required. Herein lie the variability and wildcards of or-
ganized networks. The persistence of dispute and disagreement can be
taken as a given. Rational consensus models of democracy have proven,

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in their failure, that such underlying conditions of social-political life

cannot be eradicated.
Organized networks are the social-technical system best suited to
further develop the possibility of an inclusive information society.
Since they have the capacity to operate on multiple scales of practice
and communication, the challenge for organized networks consists of
how they will engage their counterpart – networked organizations –
which, after all, are the dominant institutions. One of the first tasks for
organized networks is to address the question of sustainability, which
hangs off the conditions of labour. Only then can they begin to provide
an operative base for their subnational, intraregional and transnational
geographies of expression.

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Part ii
3 Creative Industries,
Comparative Media Theory and the Limits of
Critique from Within

Every space has become ad space.

Steve Hayden, Wired Magazine, 2003.

Obsession with economic considerations illustrates the dangers of

monopolies of knowledge and suggests the necessity of appraising
its limitations.
Harold A. Innis, Empire and Communications, 1950.

The limit is not outside language, it is the outside of language.

Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 1993.

Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that media technologies constitute a senso-

ry extension of the body holds an elective affinity with Ernst Jünger’s
notion of ‘“organic construction” [which] indicates [a] synergy between
man and machine’ and Walter Benjamin’s exploration of the mimetic
correspondence between the organic and the inorganic, between hu-
man and non-human forms.1 Today, new information and communica-
tion technologies communicate with each other, seemingly independ-
ent of human intervention. Think of the dialogue between financial
transactions and interest rates in banking systems, the registration of
calls in telephone bills, the updating of information in your computer
system. In the world of signs, the logo or brand is co-extensive with vari-
ous media of communication – billboards, tv advertisements, fashion
labels, book spines, mobile phones, and so forth. Often the logo is inter-
changeable with the product itself or a way or life. It appears that the so-
cial life of things is always defined by relations internal to their opera-
tion within a social-technical system. Since all social relations are medi-
ated, whether by communications technologies or architectonic forms
ranging from corporate buildings to sporting grounds to family living
rooms, it follows that there can be no outside to sociality. The social is

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and always has been in a mutually determining relationship with medi-

ating forms. It is in this sense that there is no outside.
Such an idea has become a refrain among various contemporary me-
dia theorists. Here’s a sample from three leading media theorists, Geert
Lovink, McKenzie Wark, and Scott Lash:

There is no outside position anymore, nor is this perceived as some-

thing desirable.2

Both ‘us’ and ‘them’ (whoever we are, whoever they are) are all al-
ways situated in this same virtual geography. There’s no outside . . . .
There is nothing outside the vector.3

There is no more outside. The critique of information is in the infor-

mation itself.4

In declaring a universality for media culture and information flows,5

all of the above statements acknowledge the political and conceptual
failure of assuming a critical position outside social-technically consti-
tuted relations. Similarly, they recognize the problems associated with
the ‘ideology critique’ of the Frankfurt School who, in their distinction
between ‘true’ and ‘false-consciousness’, claimed a sort of absolute
knowledge for the critic that transcended the field of ideology as it is
produced by the culture industry. Althusser’s conception of ideology,
material practices and subject formation, while more complex than that
of the Frankfurt School’s, nevertheless also fell prey to the pretence of
historical materialism as an autonomous ‘science’ that is able to analyti-
cally determine the totality of lived social relations.
One of the key failings of ideology critique, then, is its incapacity to
account for the ways in which the critic, theorist or intellectual is impli-
cated in the operations of ideology. Such approaches displace the reflex-
ivity and power relationships between epistemology, ontology and
their constitution as material practices within institutional forms,
cultural expressions and social-technical historical constellations, all
of which are the primary settings for the instantiation of ideology. The
notion of ideology as a lived relation between people and things can be
retained, I think, when it is located within this kind of non-representa-

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tional, materialist analytical framework. Lash abandons the term ideol-

ogy altogether because of its conceptual legacies within German dialec-
tics and French post-structuralist aporetics, both of which ‘are based in
a fundamental dualism, a fundamental binary, of the two types of rea-
son. One speaks of grounding and reconciliation, the other of unbridge-
ability. . . . Both presume a sphere of transcendence’.6
Such assertions can be made at a general level concerning these di-
verse and often conflicting approaches when they are reduced to cate-
gories for the purpose of a polemic. However, as I go on to discuss in
chapter 5, the work of ‘post-structuralists’ such as Foucault, Deleuze and
Guattari and the work of German systems theorist Niklas Luhmann is
clearly amenable to the task of critique of and within information soci-
eties. Indeed, Lash draws on such theorists in assembling his critical dis-
positif for the information age. More concretely, Lash advances his case
for a new mode of critique by noting the social-technical and historical
shift from ‘constitutive dualisms of the era of the national manufactur-
ing society’ to global information cultures, whose constitutive forms
are immanent to informational networks and flows.7 Such a shift, ac-
cording to Lash, needs to be met with a corresponding mode of critique:

Ideologycritique [ideologiekritik] had to be somehow outside of ideology.

With the disappearance of a constitutive outside, informationcri-
tique must be inside of information. There is no outside any more.8

Lash goes on to note that ‘Informationcritique itself is branded, another

object of intellectual property, machinically mediated’.9 Or, as Adorno
proclaimed a few decades earlier, ‘No theory today escapes the market-
place’.10 It is the political and conceptual tensions between information
critique and its regulation via intellectual property regimes that condi-
tion critique as yet another brand or logo that I wish to explore in this
chapter and the next. Further, I will question the supposed erasure of
a ‘constitutive outside’ of the field of social-technical relations within
network societies and informational economies. Lash is far too totaliz-
ing in supposing a break between industrial modes of production and
informational flows. Moreover, the assertion that there is no more out-
side to information too readily and simplistically assumes information-
al relations as universal and horizontally organized, and hence over-

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looks the significant structural, cultural and economic obstacles to par-

ticipation within media vectors. The outside holds an immanent rela-
tion with information. Indeed, there are a plurality of outsides. These
outsides are intertwined in singular ways with the flows of capital and
the operations of biopower.11 As difficult as it may be to ascertain
boundaries, they nonetheless exist. Just ask the so-called ‘illegal immi-
grant’!
This chapter assumes that three key forces comprise a constitutive
outside of any media-information system: material (uneven geogra-
phies of labour-power, disjunctive social-technical systems, and the dig-
ital divide), symbolic (cultural capital and a-signifying semiotic sys-
tems), and strategic (figures of critique, situated interventions and per-
manent collaborations). In a basic sense, legal and material outsides are
indeed no more than just that. One may be said to be ‘outside’ the rule
of law when downloading pornography or music files from the Inter-
net, for instance; another is without access to a particular database due
to uneven funding across and within universities, or unable to access
the Net because of their remote geographical location (to say nothing
of their economic circumstances); or else, as a result of an individual’s
social-cultural disposition, there is just no interest in such matters. Yet
legal and material outsides also amount to more than this. Irrespective
of how often we have heard about issues such as the digital divide, we
need to hear about these outsides again and again; even better, we need
to be confronted by them, and to encounter their violence – be it sym-
bolic or material (rather than ‘Real’, I think, since ‘the Real’ is always al-
ready present, disruptively penetrating the imaginary and the symbolic
order). We need to work out ways of addressing such issues if we want
to engage with some of the basic ethico-political situations of contem-
porary life. Material and legal outsides at once articulate with and act as
a constitutive force for ontological and biopolitical dimensions of life.
This takes us to the challenge of thinking difference within negativity,
which I address in the second half of this chapter.
Over the next two chapters my point of reference in developing this
inquiry will pivot around an analysis of the importation in Australia of
the British ‘creative industries project’ and the problematic foundation
such a project presents to the branding and commercialization of intel-
lectual labour. The Creative Industries movement – or ‘Queensland Ide-

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ology’,12 as I have discussed elsewhere with Danny Butt – holds further

implications for the political and economic position of the university
vis-à-vis the arts and humanities. The institutional variant of creative
industries – as promulgated by the likes of Tony Blair’s Creative Indus-
tries Task Force (citf) and their academic counterparts in Australia –
constructs itself as inside the culture of informationalism and its con-
comitant economies by the fact that it is an exercise in branding. Such
branding is evidenced in the discourses, rhetoric and policies of the
creative industries, as adopted by university faculties and academics,
government departments and the cultural industries and service sectors
seeking to reposition themselves in an institutional environment that is
adjusting to ongoing structural reforms. These reforms are attributed to
demands by the informational economy for increased labour flexibility
and specialization, institutional and economic deregulation, product
customization and capital accumulation.
The content of creative industries produced by labour-power is
branded as copyrights and trademarks within the system of intellectual
property regimes. However, a constitutive outside operates in material,
symbolic and strategic ways that condition the possibility of creative in-
dustries. The constitutive outside of creative industries marks its limit,
and thereby its extent.13 To this end, a critique of the limits of creative
industries contributes to rather than detracts from the various mapping
projects undertaken in the name of creative industries. In terms of me-
dia or information critique, I am not denying that the critic or intellec-
tual is situated within a media system – social relations are always al-
ready mediated through different communications media and architec-
tonic forms which constitute the dispositif of expression. However, we
don’t all occupy the same situation within a media system. Much of the
work in media and cultural studies has examined the delimiting role
played by class, ethnicity, gender, age and so forth with regard to the
production of meaning and the uses of media forms.
There are also considerable political and conceptual limits to any cri-
tique that dispenses with the constitutive force of the ‘outside’. Obvi-
ously, a substantial limit to any critique consists of the different theo-
retical and disciplinary knowledge accumulated by any intellectual or
critic. Epistemic boundaries coupled with their institutional settings de-
fine different historical epochs and operate as a horizon of intelligibility

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within which the present may be understood by actors with varying ca-
pacities of expression. I will argue that Deleuze’s notion of a plane of
immanence provides a particularly rich conceptual framework with
which to theorize the role of a constitutive outside within the logic of
informationalism. My critique of the creative industries project also
serves as a mechanism for extracting a concept of communications
media that acknowledges the constitutive role of the outside – or what
Deleuze terms the ‘limit’ – within the plane of immanence.
Finally, my approach corresponds with the ‘comparative media theo-
ry’ research conducted by Ian Angus, who draws on the rich tradition of
media and communications theory in Canada, as pioneered by Harold
Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong and Eric Havelock. This work is
characterized by its interest in the constitutive force of communica-
tions media as a social relation, and distinguishes itself from research in
the field that is concerned with analysing media content and its effects.
Comparative media theory, as set out by Angus, places an emphasis on
the polemical role of critique of ‘the dominant culture’. At times this
chapter also adopts a polemical stance against aspects of the dominant
culture as it is played out in the arts and humanities. My target is the
creative industries and a growing tendency within media theory to
ignore the constitutive force of the outside. In undertaking such a
critique, my interest is in the possibilities for new institutional forms,
particularly as they emerge within a field of new ICTs underpinned by
antagonistic social-political and economic relations.

Creative Industries, Intellectual Property Regimes and the ‘New Economy’

The creative industries project, as envisioned by the Blair govern-
ment’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport (dcms) responsible for
the Creative Industry Task Force Mapping Documents of 1998 and
2001, is interested in enhancing the ‘creative’ potential of cultural
labour in order to extract a commercial value from cultural objects and
services. The dcms cast its net wide when defining creative sectors and
deploys a lexicon that is as vague and unquantifiable as the next mis-
sion statement by government and corporate bodies enmeshed within a
neoliberal paradigm.14 The list of sectors identified as holding creative
capacities in the citf Mapping Document include: film, music, televi-
sion and radio, publishing, software, interactive leisure software,

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design, designer fashion, architecture, performing arts, crafts, arts and

antique markets, architecture and advertising. The Mapping Document
seeks to demonstrate how these sectors consist of ‘activities which have
their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have the
potential for wealth and job creation through generation and exploita-
tion of intellectual property’.15
The citf’s identification of intellectual property (ip) as central to the
creation of jobs and wealth firmly places the creative industries within
informational and knowledge economies. Unlike material property, in-
tellectual property such as artistic creations (films, music, books) and
innovative technical processes (software, biotechnologies) are forms of
knowledge that do not diminish when they are distributed. This is espe-
cially the case when information has been encoded in a digital form and
distributed through technologies such as the Internet. In such in-
stances, information is often attributed an ‘immaterial’ and nonrival-
rous quality, although this can be highly misleading for both the con-
ceptualization of information and the politics of knowledge produc-
tion. I address the problematic of ‘immateriality’ with reference to cre-
ative labour in the next chapter.
For all the emphasis the Mapping Document places on exploiting
intellectual property, it is remarkable how absent any consideration of
ip is from creative industries rhetoric. It is even more astonishing that
media and cultural studies academics have until recently given passing
attention to the issues of iprs.16 Perhaps such oversights by academics
associated with the creative industries can be accounted for by the fact
that their own jobs rest within the modern, industrial institution of the
university, which continues to offer the security of a salary award sys-
tem and continuing if not tenured employment despite the onslaught
of neoliberal reforms since the 1980s. Such an industrial system of tradi-
tional and organized labour, however, does not define the labour condi-
tions for those working in the so-called creative industries. Within
those sectors engaged more intensively in commercializing culture,
labour practices closely resemble work characterized by the dotcom
boom, which saw young people working excessively long hours with-
out any of the sort of employment security and protection vis-à-vis
salary, health benefits and pension schemes peculiar to traditional and
organized labour.17 During the dotcom mania of the mid to late 1990s,

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stock options were frequently offered to people as an incentive for off-

setting the often minimum or even deferred payment of wages.
The attraction of stock options and the rhetorical sheen of ‘share-
holder democracy’ adopted by neoliberal governments became brutally
unstuck in 2000 with the crash of the nasdaq, which saw the collapse in
share value of high-tech stocks and telcos. This ‘tech-wreck’ was fol-
lowed up by the negative impact of September 11 on tourism and avia-
tion sectors. The ‘market populism’ of the high-tech stock bubble, as
Thomas Frank explains, was defined by a delirious faith in entrepre-
neurial culture and the capacity for new ICTs articulated with corporate
governance and financescapes to function as a policy and electoral
panacea for neoliberal states obsessed with dismantling the welfare
state model and severing their responsibilities for social development.18
The creative industries project emerged out of a similar context and
adopted much of the same rhetoric, with a greater orientation towards
‘creative capital’. It remains questionable as to the extent to which such
rhetoric is transposable on an international scale and the extent to
which it is then appropriate to be adopted by countries and regions
with significantly and sometimes substantially different social-political
relations, industrial structures and policies, and cultural forms and
practices.
Another key precondition for the growth of the creative industries
consists of a crisis within the ‘art system’. As new ICTs became an in-
creasing part of social and economic life within advanced economies
throughout the 1990s, the culture industry continued on oblivious to
this social-technical transformation. And why not? In Australia, like
much of Europe and North America, the traditional forms of artistic ex-
pression – classical music, ballet, and opera in particular – have their
well-established systems of patronage and government funding. Even
though one might think that it should have been the task of the arts to
deal with media and creative industries, they weren’t about to let any-
thing like new media arts disrupt the comfort of the status quo. While
public sectors across the board were grappling with the impact of eco-
nomic rationalist ideologies, the ‘high’ arts held dear to their myth of
somehow being autonomous from prevailing socio-economic forces.
The disjuncture between art and informationization functions as a con-
stitutive outside of the creative industries, especially once that disjunc-

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ture is articulated with other forces (outsides). Two key forces consist
of, firstly, a neoliberal, post-‘New Left’ in Britain in search of electoral
legitimacy through a Third Way discourse that sought a more compre-
hensive bonding between culture and the economy. And secondly,
a substantial increase in both Britain and Australia of students coming
out of vocationalized humanities programmes (media and cultural
studies, performance studies, art and design, journalism, multimedia,
it, etcetera) who want jobs as either creative producers, service workers,
or cultural intermediaries and who therefore hold government interest
as an emergent electoral constituency.
While the creative industries are emergent as an institutional forma-
tion, they have in recent years gained dominance at a discursive level
on an international scale. The ensemble of articulation consists of four
principle components that together hold a hegemonic force: 1) govern-
ment policies on higher education that privilege industry affiliation
over the pursuit of core values of scholarship and pedagogy within the
arts and humanities; 2) Third Way ideology that is ready to legitimate
a plurality of socio-cultural values, but only if they can translate into
commercial form; 3) research by the oecd and an assortment of suprana-
tional research agencies, think-tanks, corporate r&d teams and govern-
ment departments that have an interest in establishing intellectual
property as the architecture for a global information and knowledge
economy that can extract profit from education and culture; and 4)
a populist strand within the field of media and cultural studies that
considers consumer (audience-student-citizen) desire as relatively au-
tonomous and self-forming and hence the basis upon which university
curricula should be shaped. This approach within media and cultural
studies gained purchase in the 1980s and ’90s as an alternative to the
impasse of ideology critique, advocating the sovereign power of the con-
sumer over the structural forces of the state and affiliated organizations.
In this regard, the populist approach has established the preconditions
necessary for a relatively smooth transition within the arts and humani-
ties into the current era of the university as a pseudo-corporation.
Many would argue that this is all proper and good – promoting the
creative industries is a truly responsible project, since rather than im-
posing a set of cultural values from above, it is giving students-as-con-
sumers what they want and need in order to realize and obtain the kind

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of lifestyle and professional satisfaction and challenges they desire.

I wouldn’t deny that these are important factors; my argument is that
for all the populism – which, in any case, is and always has been a great
fallacy at a structural level if not a rhetorical one – of creative industries
style discourses, there is a substantial constituency which holds no in-
terest for proponents of the creative industries. A focus on the role of
intellectual property regimes reveals that the labour-power of the core
constituency of the creative industries – information workers, program-
mers, designers, media producers, and so forth – is the primary vehicle
for exploitation and exclusion. Even though it is situated within the
social-technical and discursive system of the creative industries, the
labour-power of creative workers functions as a constitutive outside for
the creative industries. Just as there is no outside for information cri-
tique, for proponents of the creative industries there is no culture that
is worth its name if it is outside a market economy.19 That is, the com-
mercialization of ‘creativity’ – or indeed commerce as a creative under-
taking – acts as a legitimizing function and hence plays a delimiting
role for ‘culture’ and, by association, sociality. The institutional life of
career academics is also at stake in this legitimizing process.
The valuation of culture in terms of its potential exchange value is in
direct contrast to the ‘aesthetic’ value of culture set out in the work of
nineteenth-century social reformer and school inspector Mathew
Arnold and his mid-twentieth-century extension, the literary critic F. R.
Leavis. The guiding principle within their paternalistic, ‘civilizing’ and
humanistic worldview consisted of evaluating culture as ‘the best of
what has been thought and said’.20 Such an evaluative regime became
the basis upon which to uphold the moral and political authority of the
ruling classes whose value system was perceived to be under threat by
the emergent ‘mass culture’ of the working classes and expanding bour-
geoisie. Thus elite cultural forms such as painting, classical music and
sculpture were privileged over the commercial cultural technologies of
popular songs, novels, newspapers, radio and the cinema that appealed
to the working and middle classes. Within the ‘culture and civilization’
tradition exemplified by Arnold and more particularly Leavis and oth-
ers involved in the literary critical journal Scrutiny, the ‘inherent quali-
ty’ or aesthetics of elite cultural forms was assumed to transcend social
and economic relations. Culture in this sense was static, unchanging

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and exclusive. The British cultural studies tradition inaugurated by the

materialist work of Williams, Hoggart and Thompson contested this
view of culture. Emerging out of the growth in adult education with the
return of soldiers from the Second World War, British cultural studies
was interested in the everyday aspects of culture and paid particular
attention to the symbolic dimensions and social uses of cultural forms.
This foundation myth of cultural studies is now well rehearsed and
repeated verbatim within literature in the field.21 My purpose in re-
producing this story of origins is to set out some initial parameters in
which to locate the paradox of culture within the creative industries.
Despite the efforts of the creative industries’ academic proponents to
argue for the merits of popular cultural forms, within a creative indus-
tries discourse informed by policies and rhetoric of the information or
knowledge economy, ‘culture’ reclaims a privileged location. And it is
one that is remarkably similar in a structural sense to the discursive
economy that informed the Arnoldian and Leavisite concept of culture:
‘quality’ culture is defined within the creative industries as that which
has the capacity to generate and exploit intellectual property. Because
the political and economic architecture of iprs is premised on the ca-
pacity to restrict access to the object or form enclosed within the infor-
mational and legal system of ip, culture that has been incorporated as ip
is available only to those with the economic and cultural capital that
enables them access to the particular cultural form encoded as ip. In this
sense, culture is elite; it is certainly not ‘working class’, and while it may
be ‘popular’ it is only popular within a particular class setting that has
the means to access and control it.22 Since access is the means to the
reproduction, expansion and thus innovation of culture, the enclosure
of culture as forms of knowledge within a system of ip raises questions
of elitism against the populist rhetoric found within much creative
industries discourse.
Intellectual property, as distinct from material property, operates as
a scaling device whereby the unit cost of labour is offset by the potential
for substantial profit margins realized by distribution techniques
availed by new ICTs and their capacity to infinitely reproduce the digital
commodity object as a property relation. Within the logic of intellec-
tual property regimes, the use of content is based on the capacity of
individuals and institutions to pay. The syndication of media content

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ensures that market saturation is optimal and competition is kept to a

minimum. However, such a legal architecture has run into conflict with
other network cultures such as open source movements and peer-to-
peer networks that operate by alternative intellectual property codes, as
seen in the examples of the Creative Commons licence, the open con-
tent Wikipedia encyclopaedias, and Linux software.23 Other instances
of political conflict that are set to become an increasing concern for
hegemonic media and international diplomacy and trade agreements
consist of the digital piracy of software and digitally encoded cinematic
forms, particularly within China.24 To this end, iprs are an unstable ar-
chitecture for extracting profit.
As Scott McQuire has noted, there is a ‘strategic rationale’ behind the
creative industries project: ‘It provides a means for highlighting the sig-
nificant economic contribution already made collectively by areas
which individually may pass unnoticed all too easily’.25 In this respect,
the creative industries concept is a welcome and responsible interven-
tion. But as McQuire also goes on to point out, the creative industries
project ‘provides a template for change in educational curricula’. This
aspect warrants a more circumspect approach to the largely enthusias-
tic embrace of the concept of creative industries. Change of course is
inevitable and is often much needed. However, there is a conformist
principle underpinning the concept of creative industries as it has been
adopted in Australia – namely the reduction of ‘creativity’ to content
production and the submission of the arts and humanities to the mar-
ket test,26 which involves exploiting and generating intellectual proper-
ty.27 What happens to those academic programmes that prove unsuc-
cessful in the largely government and market-driven push to converge
various media of expression into a digital form? How are the actual pro-
ducers – the ‘creative’ workers – to be protected from the exploitation
incurred from being content producers?
It is understandable that the creative industries project holds an ap-
peal for managerial intellectuals operating in arts and humanities disci-
plines in Australia. The Queensland University of Technology (qut),
which claims to have established the ‘world’s first’ Creative Industries
faculty, has been particularly active in reproducing and developing the
British model of creative industries.28 The creative industries model pro-
vides a validating discourse for those suffering anxiety disorders over

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what Ruth Barcan has called the ‘usefulness’ of ‘idle’ intellectual pas-
times.29 As a project that endeavours to articulate graduate skills with
labour markets, the creative industries project is a natural extension
of the neoliberal agenda within education as advocated by successive
governments in Australia since the Dawkins reforms in the mid 1980s.30
Certainly there’s a constructive dimension to this: graduates, after all,
need jobs, and universities should display an awareness of market
conditions; within managerial discourses of ‘quality assurance’ and
‘accountability’, academics also have a responsibility to do so. I find it
remarkable that so many university departments in my own field of
communications and media studies are so bold and, let’s face it, stupid,
as to make unwavering assertions about market demands and student
needs on the basis of doing little more than sniffing the wind! Time for
a reality check. This means becoming more serious about allocating
funds and resources towards market analysis based on the combination
of needs among students, staff, disciplinary values, university expecta-
tions, and the political economy of markets.
The extent to which there should be a wholesale shift of the arts and
humanities into a creative industries model is open to debate. The arts
and humanities, after all, are a set of disciplinary practices and values
that operate as a constitutive outside for creative industries. Indeed, in
their Creative Industries manifesto, Stuart Cunningham and John Hart-
ley loathe the arts and humanities in such confused and paradoxical
ways in order to establish the arts and humanities as a sort of cultural
and ideological outside, yet without acknowledging the constitutive
power of that outside.31 To subsume the arts and humanities into the
creative industries, if not eradicate them altogether, is to spell the end
of creative industry as it is currently conceived at the institutional level
within academe.
Too much specialization in one post-industrial sector ensures a situa-
tion of labour reserves that exceed market needs. One only needs to con-
sider all those now unemployed web-designers who graduated from
multi-media programmes in the mid to late 1990s. Vocational special-
ization does not augur well for the inevitable shift from or collapse of
a creative industries economy. Where is the standing reserve of labour
shaped by university education and training in a post-creative indus-
tries economy? Diehard neoliberals and true believers in the capacity

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for perpetual institutional flexibility would say that this isn’t a prob-
lem. The university will just ‘organically’ adapt to prevailing market
conditions and shape its curriculum and staff composition accordingly.
Perhaps. Arguably if the university is to maintain a modality of time
that is distinct from the just-in-time mode of production characteristic
of informational economies – and indeed, such a difference is a quality
that defines the market value of the educational commodity – then lim-
its have to be established between institutions of education and the cor-
porate organization or creative industry entity.
The creative industries project is a reactionary model in so far as it re-
inforces the status quo of labour relations within a neoliberal paradigm
in which bids for industry contracts are based on a combination of rich
technological infrastructures often subsidized by the state (that is, paid
for by the public), high labour skills, a low currency exchange rate and
the lowest possible labour costs. It is no wonder that literature on the
creative industries omits discussion of the importance of unions within
informational, networked economies. What is the role of unions in a
labour force constituted as individualized units?32 I will address this
question at greater length in chapter 4.
There is a great need to explore alternative economic models to the
content production one if wealth is to be successfully extracted and dis-
tributed from activities in the new media sectors. The suggestion that
the creative industries project initiates a strategic response to the condi-
tions of cultural production within network societies and information-
al economies is highly debateable. The now well-documented history of
digital piracy in the film and software industries and the difficulties as-
sociated with regulating violations to proprietors of ip in the form of
copyright and trademarks is enough of a reason to look for alternative
models of wealth extraction. And you can be sure this will occur irre-
spective of the endeavours of the creative industries.
The conditions of possibility for creative industries within Australia
are at the same time its frailties. A significant portion of the creative in-
dustries sector in Australia is engaged in film production associated
with Hollywood’s activities ‘down under’. In such instances intellectual
property is not owned by Australian corporations or individuals, but is
held more often by us-based multinationals. The success of the creative
industries sector depends upon the ongoing combination of cheap

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labour enabled by a low currency exchange rate and the capacity of

students to access the skills and training offered by universities. Of all
these factors, much depends on the Australian currency being pegged at
a substantially lower exchange rate than the us dollar. The economic ef-
fects in the usa of an expensive military intervention in Iraq and the
larger costs associated with the ‘war on terror’, along with the ongoing
economic fallout from the dotcom crash and corporate collapses, have
all led to a creeping increase in the value of the Australian dollar against
the greenback.
Reports in The Australian Financial Review support these claims, not-
ing that foreign investment – most particularly from Hollywood film
studios – in Australian feature film and television drama production
‘fell for the first time in eight years’.33 The 23 per cent drop is directly
attributed to the rising Australian dollar. In the case of tv productions,
the lack of refundable tax incentives has had a negative effect, unlike
New Zealand which adopted incentives for foreign investment in the
industry. The drop in expenditure was even greater for international
joint ventures: ‘Expenditure on international co-productions was down
50 per cent in 2002-03, from $102 million in 2001-02 to $51 million,
reducing the size of Australian tv and film production by nearly a quar-
ter’.34 A fall in postproduction and foreign production in studios in
Sydney, Melbourne and Queensland is also expected in the coming
years. The security of creative labour will also be affected by the Free
Trade Agreement (fta) between Australia and the usa, which came into
effect in January 2005. The fta will have a substantial impact on Aus-
tralia’s media and cultural industries. Australian copyright laws will be
extended from 50 to 70 years, bringing them into so-called ‘harmoniza-
tion’ with the usa. While the fta has retained local content rules that
require 55 per cent of all free-to-air tv programming in Australia to
consist of locally produced programmes and ads, there is uncertainty
over the impact this will have on pay tv, multi-channelling and new
media technologies such as the Internet, mobile telephony and inter-
active digital cinema. The likely result for many media industries is an
increase in us content and market control. As Australian new media
scholar and teacher Chris Chesher has pointed out, ‘This one bilateral
agreement may restrict future governments from making policy that
fosters the development of a new media industry in Australia’.35

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In a globalizing economy that is substantially shaped by the us do-

mestic economy and its transnational corporate interests, the sum ef-
fect of these developments is a downgrading of skills and experience in
the media industries and fewer jobs for Australian technicians, musi-
cians and actors – a number of whom will be graduates from creative in-
dustries programmes. The security of labour is contingent then upon
the relative stability of global financial systems which are underpinned
by risk, uncertainty and a faith in the hubris peculiar to discourses on
growth and expansion associated with the ‘New Economy’.36 Additional
contingencies emerge with government policies that seek to intervene
in the supranational, regional and national regulatory fields of trade
agreements, privacy rights, and so forth.
In relation to matters such as these there may appear to be no out-
side for the creative industries. However, a model of communications
and informationality that locates points of tension, conflict, or antago-
nism will often discover the constitutive force of an outside at work.
As I’ve argued above, the operation of intellectual property regimes
constitutes an outside within creative industries by alienating labour
from its mode of information or form of expression. Lash is apposite on
this point: ‘Intellectual property carries with it the right to exclude’.37
This principle of exclusion applies not only to those outside the infor-
mational economy and culture of networks as a result of geographic,
economic, infrastructural, and cultural constraints. In instances where
ownership of intellectual property belongs to the commissioning agent,
practitioners within the creative industries are excluded from control
over their creations.38 It is in this sense that a legal and material outside
is established within an informational society. At the same time, this in-
ternal outside – to put it rather clumsily – operates in a constitutive
manner in as much as the creative industries, by definition, depend
upon the capacity to exploit the ip produced by its primary source of
labour. In order to further develop a notion of a constitutive outside,
I now turn to Deleuze’s logic of immanence and elaborate the elective
affinities it holds with Marxian post-negativity. I will then suggest how
a constitutive outside is assumed within a ‘comparative media theory’
of technology and culture.

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Post-Negativity and the Logic of Immanence

The challenge for a politics of informational cultures and social-
technical systems is to define limits at the current conjuncture. In ways
similar to New Age devotees, cyber-libertarians, spokespeople for the
imf and many political activists, proponents of the creative industries so
often insist on and valorise ‘openness’. In case we have forgotten, open-
ness itself is conditioned by the possibility of exclusion. What are the
limits of the informational inside? In the case of creative industries,
what are the implications of experiencing what Giorgio Agamben calls
the event-horizon, or qualunque (‘whatever’) as ‘the event of an outside . .
. of being-within an outside’?39 This sort of question underpins what it
means to theorize about those working with the creative industries –
a cultural sector that enlists actors with multiple capacities whose inno-
vative labour-power is the condition for their exclusion from absolute
self-governance, as bequeathed upon them by a managerial intellectual
class within universities, government, r&d agencies, and policy think-
tanks such as Demos (uk), the Cato Institute (usa), and the Centre for
Independent Studies (Australia).
In order to build a theoretical framework for thinking the role of the
constitutive outside for the creative industries, I will briefly outline the
notion of post-negativity and then distinguish a Deleuzian logic of im-
manence from Lash’s problematic deployment of a concept of imma-
nence, which he enlists as a metaphor to describe the absolute interiori-
ty of relations within information societies. Perhaps part of the problem
here is that Lash invokes the metaphor of immanence as a concept,
while Deleuze and Guattari insist that the plane of immanence ‘is nei-
ther a concept nor the concept of concepts’.40 The finite movement of
concepts subsists within the infinite movements of the plane of imma-
nence.41 Thus immanence is better understood as a process of singular
events rather than a ubiquitous condition, as many critics and theorists
have posited.
For Lash the notion of a constitutive outside is untenable since it is
overdetermined and revealed as transcendent by the action of dialectics.
The outside is always already that which is beyond, impossible, false.
Lash believes the social-technical time of dialectics and the technics of
industrial production have been surpassed by informationalism (real-
time, interactivity, flow). Though I wonder, is there a combinatory prac-

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tice for media and cultural studies that goes by the name of affirmative
critique? Unlike Lash, Mouffe argues that ‘the “constitutive outside”
cannot be reduced to a dialectical negation. In order to be a true outside,
the outside has to be incommensurable with the inside, and at the same
time, the condition of emergence of the latter’.42 For Mouffe, the consti-
tutive outside is not so much a dialectics as a suspension (a state of excep-
tion), a movement whereby that which is excluded or outside is also the
condition of possibility for, and conditioned by, the inside, which incor-
porates the outside as it simultaneously excludes it. I argue that the
emergence of creative industries is caught up in such a process.
Deleuze understands the operation of this condition in terms of a
‘fold’, which I discuss below. Adorno’s concept of ‘immanent criticism’
provides a first point of connection between thinking difference within
negativity, the logic of immanence as understood by Deleuze, and the
constitutive outside. By my reading of Deleuze, the constitutive outside
is the difference within negativity. In her recent book Thinking Past
Terror, Susan Buck-Morss summarizes the characteristics of negative
dialectics and immanent criticism as follows:

Relying on the Hegelian dialectics of negativity, combined with a

Kantian humility as to the limits of what can be known, immanent
criticism as practiced by Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and
others sought to transcend the untruth of the present society in a
non-dogmatic, critical, hence negative mode, showing the gap
between concept and reality – how, for example, so-called democra-
cies were undemocratic; how mass culture was un-cultured; how
Western civilization was barbaric; and, in a classic study, Dialectic of
Enlightenment, written in the catastrophic context of World War II,
how reason, the highest value of European modernity, had become
unreason.43

Thus an ‘immanent critique’ of the creative industries would set out to

prove that the creative industries are neither ‘creative’, nor an ‘industry’.
Such an undertaking is not my interest in this chapter. Rather, I am in-
terested in unpacking the articulation between Adorno’s negative im-
manent critique and Deleuze’s affirmative logic of immanence.
Adorno’s technique of immanent criticism seeks to uncover the contra-

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dictions inherent within the work of Hegel, Kant and Heidegger, among
others. Orthodox Marxist thinking is also given a serve of Adorno’s
wrath. In his magnum opus, Negative Dialectics, Adorno’s procedure is
not to critique various trajectories within Western philosophy and po-
litical theory from a position outside their terms of reference and princi-
ples of deduction. Adorno is not interested in judgement from above or
the safety net of an external anti-bourgeois position. That would be too
easy to feign, and even easier to dismiss. Instead, he seeks to undertake
a critique from within, an ‘immanent critique’, that ascertains the
failure of philosophical disciplines to think through questions of
metaphysics and problems of ontology. Opening his immanent critique
of ontology, Adorno writes: ‘We have no power over the philosophy of
Being if we reject it generally, from outside, instead of taking it on in its
own structure – turning its force against it . . .’.44 Adorno extended this
method beyond the realm of philosophy, and into a critique of ‘mass
culture’. Buck-Morss explains the operation of immanent critique with
reference to Adorno’s essay ‘On the Fetish Character of Music and the
Regression of Hearing’:

Adorno made the characteristics of fetishism, reification, and ex-

change visible ‘inside’ the phenomenon of listening to music. . . .
Adorno claimed that ‘serious’ and popular music converged not sim-
ply because of the revolutions of technological reproduction, but
because of the transformations in the relationship between the audi-
ence as subject and the music as object, which determined the form
of the new technologies as well as being determined by them. . . .
Adorno claimed that the ‘positive’, that is, technological progress
in the mass production of music, was in fact ‘negative’, the develop-
ment of regression in listening: the mass audience, instead of experi-
encing music, consumed it as a fetishized object, the value of which
was determined by exchange.45

Interestingly, Adorno was not ipso facto against taking a position of cri-
tique from outside, but only if it served the purpose of immanent cri-
tique. In his rejection of the ‘identity principle’ underpinning the
Hegelian concept of history, which contrives a coincidence of subject
and object, Adorno reserves a space for the outside: ‘Pure identity is that

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which the subject posits and thus brings up from the outside. Therefore,
paradoxically enough, to criticize it immanently means to criticize it
from outside as well’.46 Perhaps in response to the elevated status Ben-
jamin grants to the modern experience of shock, Adorno retains the
possibility of an outside, so long as it holds the potential for disruption
and the attainment of truth: ‘No immanent critique can serve its pur-
pose wholly without outside knowledge, of course – without a moment
of immediacy, if you will, a bonus from the subjective thought that
looks beyond the dialectical structure. That moment is the moment
of spontaneity . . .’.47
It is this suggestion of an outside that functions as a constitutive
force that I wish to retrieve from Adorno’s method of immanent cri-
tique. Rather than a negativity comprised of contradictions or antino-
mies whose tensions structurally determine the discontinuity of history
and disintegration in Western culture, how might negativity be
thought in terms of a diagrammatics of tensions that traverse and con-
stitute overlapping fields of networks – and clusters of creative indus-
tries – as an affirmative force? Benjamin understood this process in his
diagrammatic taxonomies of modern life. Benjamin’s analytical method
consisted of identifying tensions located at the intersection between the
‘axis of transcendence’ (theology) and the ‘the axis of empirical history’
(Marxism).48 Thus while he also worked with a model of negative
dialectics (a theological, historical materialism of the ‘dialectical
image’49), Benjamin was more open than Adorno to the possibility of
different arrangements of collision, of splintering, of resonance. His
technics of ‘profane illumination’ carried the possibility of mobile,
though not arbitrary, combinations and ethico-aesthetic renewal or
redemption.50 In this respect, one can detect an affirmative, as distinct
from wholly negative, reworking of historical materialism.
Post-negativity is a mode of critique that thinks beyond the dualisms
of subject/object, culture/nature, friend/enemy, us/them, life/death and
so forth. Post-negativity defines not just a mode of thought, but thought
that emerges from and permeates social-technical and historical condi-
tions of the present. Post-negativity retains the concept of a constitutive
outside. This is an outside that is configured not according to dualisms,
but rather to patterns of distribution, series of encounters, rhythms of
tension, spaces of dispute. Negativity persists within informational soci-

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eties since the informational society is a continuum of the capitalist tra-

jectory in which Negativity, in its modern incarnation, emerged as a
concept to address problems as they were perceived.51 The correspon-
dence between negativity and emergent problems figures as an elective
affinity within the work of Marx and Deleuze and Guattari. As Deleuze
and Guattari write, ‘All concepts are connected to problems without
which they would have no meaning and which can themselves only be
isolated or understood as their solution emerges’.52 In a similar vein,
Marx writes: ‘Mankind always takes up only such problems as it can
solve, since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that
the problem itself arises only when the material conditions necessary
for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation’.53
Today, the technique of negativity as a mode of critique is articulated
with, but not reducible to, emergent problematics such as access to ICTs,
ecological transmogrification, the uneven development of information-
al economies, and so on. To be sure, these are problems associated with
the myriad ways in which new ICTs play an ever-increasing role in the
mediation of social-technical relations. To this end, negativity has not
so much disappeared or been made redundant; rather, it operates within
a different social-technical historical constellation. The condition of
post-negativity is one in which social-technical and ethico-aesthetic
tensions are no longer articulated through the logic or episteme of
dialectical negation, but instead through a multiplicity of differences
that are immanent to the scalar dimensions and temporal modalities of
states, networks and social-political formations.
The problem of conceiving informational technologies and network
societies in terms of a supposed erasure of the outside can be usefully
addressed through the logic of immanence. A notion of the outside
plays an important role in Deleuze’s understanding of immanence. This
is a point frequently overlooked in recent work by Hardt and Negri,
Lash, Buck-Morss, and Wark, among others. Contrary to these thinkers,
I would maintain that a notion of the outside plays a central role in any
political theory of network societies and informationalism. Combining
a notion of the outside with that of immanence introduces a basis upon
which to begin understanding the complexity of politics within infor-
mationalism, network societies and the Internet. Such a theoretical cor-
respondence invokes the uneven, differentiated and pluralistic nature

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of social-technical systems. One is then able to combat the still very

much pervasive sense of a ‘global village’ that is so often attributed to
the Net, most particularly within popular, business and scientific dis-
courses.
Essentially, Lash deploys the concept of immanence as a metaphor to
loosely reinforce his claim that informationalism has no outside. At a
conceptual level, we will see that this is plainly wrong. This is also the
case at a material level. The brutal phenomenon of ‘illegal immigrants’
again is a good case in point: At a certain moment in time (the media-
political event of an election and beyond54) ‘they’ at once condition the
possibility of what it means to be an Australian citizen, what it means
to maintain national sovereignty and so forth, while at the very same
time precarious refugees are excluded from the rights and ways of life
that are associated with existing within the rule of the sovereign power
as a citizen-subject, or, for the ‘legitimate’ immigrant, as a global cosmo-
politan subject. In this sense, ‘we’ do not so much cling to the outside in
order to reject it, but are intimately bound with the outside as it is con-
stituted – for the most part – within the spectral dimensions (the media
imaginary) of our everyday life.
The phenomenon of flexible production by transnational corpora-
tions and the exploitation of sweatshop labour in both developing and
developed countries are surely material and symbolic instances of an
incommensurable, constitutive outside that conditions the possibility
of high living standards, practices of consumption, and material wealth
within advanced economies that adopt a neoliberal mode of gover-
nance. While labour within the ‘invisible’ zones of production is not
directly part of informational economies in terms of belonging to those
sectors identified as part of the creative industries, it is nevertheless
a condition of possibility for social relations, consumer dispositions
and labour practices within advanced economies. Even those workers
located within informationalism are positioned in relation to iprs in
such a manner as to be ‘outside’ processes of power, authority, and
decision-making, and hence occupy an illegitimate and structurally
disabled position vis-à-vis a sovereignty of the self and social collectives.
Paradoxical as it may seem, outsides of this sort play a constitutive role
in terms of what it means to be within the immanent relations of infor-
mationalism.

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Drawing primarily on Nietzsche, Bergson, Hume and Spinoza,

Deleuze maintains that life can be practiced as an experiment, experi-
ence and thought process in radical empiricism. In dialogue with Guat-
tari, Parnet, Foucault and ‘an image of thought’ that subsists within the
present as ‘coordinates, dynamics, orientations’ for philosophy,55
Deleuze invents a ‘prephilosophical’ plan – a chaosmosis of virtuality,
a plane of immanence, a force of potentiality – in which ‘relations are
external to their terms’ and from which transcendent organization is
possible.56 The ‘instituted’ plane of immanence constructs a network of
relations of force that condition the possibility of concepts.57 Yet con-
cepts are not ‘deduced from the plane’.58 Concepts subsist within or
‘populate’ the plane of immanence as ‘virtualities, events,
singularities’.59 As Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘Concepts pave, occupy,
or populate the plane bit by bit, whereas the plane itself is the indivisi-
ble milieu in which concepts are distributed without breaking up its
continuity or integrity’.60 Concepts are created in response to specific
problems; the relationship between the two is one of immanence. The
force of a constitutive outside, a univocity, makes possible the singular
relationship between problems and concepts.
Deleuze and Guattari provide two conceptions of the plan(e),61 one
in opposition to the other: a plan(e) of organization and development as
distinct from a plane of consistency or of composition or of immanence.
The former comprises a structural and genetic order, the latter consists
of rhythms and resonances in which ‘there are only relations of move-
ment and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements. . . .
There are only haecceities, affects, subjectless individuations that con-
stitute collective assemblages’.62 The plane of organization, on the other
hand, is engaged in capturing and momentarily containing the pure po-
tential of the plane of immanence. The plane of organization consists of
‘rigid segmentarity, all the lines of rigid segmentarity, [that] enclose a
certain plane, which concerns both forms and their development, sub-
jects and their formation. A plane of organization which always has at
its disposal a supplementary dimension (overcoding)’.63 Moreover,

Organization and development concern form and substance: at once

the development of form and the formation of substance or a subject.
But the plane of consistency knows nothing of substance and form:

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haecceities [singularities], which are inscribed on this plane, are

precisely modes of individuation proceeding neither by form nor by
the subject.64

As discussed in chapter 5, the plane of immanence and the plane of

transcendent organization are coextensive with the relational force of
movement between the conditions of possibility and the grid of mean-
ings, codes, signs. A processual force subsists in the movement between
these two planes. This model may seem to be nothing more than a
crude attempt to cunningly reappropriate the classical Marxist notions
of base and superstructure. The differences with that model, however,
are considerable. First, the base/superstructure consists of a dialectical
relationship in which the social relations that define the economic base
and mode of production determine the superstructure. As Massumi
writes, ‘When everything is served up in founding terms of determina-
tion – “of” or “by” – by design or by default – change can only be under-
stood as a negation of determination: as the simply indeterminate’.65
The logic of immanence is not one of determination or the indetermi-
nate; it is not One or the Other. Neither total order, nor absolute chaos.
Immanence communicates the force of movement that subsists within
relations between determination and indeterminacy. Second, the plane
of immanence, unlike the Marxian notion of the base, does not privilege
the category of ‘class’ as the transcendent principle or motivation for
political change; indeed, the category of class subsists in the plane of
organization – or that which has emerged from and is in a mobile rela-
tionship with the plane of immanence. Moreover, the relation between
the two planes is a multiplicity of ‘interleaved’ planes. Think of a cross-
section diagram of a geological formation – there is no single layer, but
rather a complex distribution and interpenetration of layers that in
themselves are composed of a complex interleaving of materials, prop-
erties, qualities. ‘Every plane of immanence is a One-All’, write Deleuze
and Guattari, ‘it is not partial like a scientific system, or fragmentary
like concepts, but distributive – it is in “each”. The plane of immanence
is interleaved’.66 In other words, the plane of immanence does not func-
tion as a foundation or determining instance; it functions as a pure po-
tential of virtuality. Agamben describes this process as one of ‘virtual
indetermination’.67 Massumi elaborates the operation of the virtuality

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of the field of immanence in terms of superempiricism: ‘Although

inseparable from the empirical elements of whose contingent mixing it
is an effect, the field of immanence is superempirical – in excess over
the substantiality of already-constituted terms’.68
Deleuze most clearly establishes the operation of the outside within
the plane of immanence in his book on Foucault. In the interests of clar-
ity, I wish to focus briefly on this work. Deleuze reads Foucault as a car-
tographer of relations comprised of forces, strategies, foldings, forms of
expression and forms of content that constitute the social field.
Deleuze’s Foucault offers a diagram of sociality, an abstract machine,
with which to think the act of mapping projects as a multiplicity of
relations. Such an approach holds a radical difference to the numerous
mapping projects undertaken within the creative industries that seek to
delimit the field of creativity and at the same time ignore the policy,
theoretical, political and practical implications of intellectual property
regimes. This is paradoxical to say the least, since it is supposedly the
generation and exploitation of ip that distinguishes the creative indus-
tries from others. Danny Butt elaborates on this problematic within
common approaches to creative industries’ mapping projects as follows:

They basically work on aggregating output in unreconstructed in-

dustry sector definitions (‘Publishing’ + ‘tv’ + ‘. . .’ = ‘Creative Indus-
tries’) that they acknowledge are inadequate in their own footnotes!
My view is that most ‘mapping’ is a political exercise to secure re-
sources from governments, and impressive-sounding figures go
down better than ‘We still don’t know how ip generates macroeco-
nomic wealth, but we know your existing classifications will need to
be changed’. There’s a huge, relatively untheorised disjuncture be-
tween the attempt to theoretically delimit the ‘creative industries’
through their special relationship to ip (which has merit), the practi-
cal problems of capitalist accumulation within these industries
(which are characterised by ip struggles), and the regional mapping
projects which basically ignore this process of ip-intensive accumula-
tion.69

Registering the complex of relations between different actants, forces,

discourses and practices that constitute the transformative potential of

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creative labour is a process, I am suggesting, that can benefit from a

Deleuzo-Foucauldian cartography of immanence. Deleuze distinguish-
es between a notion of ‘the exterior’ and that of ‘the outside’. The latter
‘exists as an unformed element of forces’.70 Force is a relation: ‘It is never
singular but essentially exists with other forces’.71 Force subsists, then,
within the plane of immanence. Force is a potential; it is a multiplicity
of relations that possess the power to affect, to shape, to create. Force
thus functions as a constitutive outside. The exterior, by contrast, is
‘the area of concrete assemblages, where relations between forces are
realized’.72 The actualization of forces takes on what Deleuze terms
‘forms of exteriority’ – these may share the same concrete assemblage,
but will differ from one another.
Within systems theory and cybernetics, ‘noise’ functions as a consti-
tutive outside for the system. However, there is a significant difference
in the terms of reference between systems theory and a Deleuzian logic
of immanence that are worth briefly noting. Luhmann does not speak
exactly of the outside, of the external, whereas Deleuze distinguishes
between externality or exteriority and the outside. For Luhmann, if
something that is external to the system can be described and thus ob-
served, then it is part of the system. Luhmann calls this kind of process
‘paradoxical circularity’, as William Rasch explains: ‘Paradoxical circu-
larity cannot be avoided by appeals to the outside; what escapes the sys-
tem can be observed, and therefore communicated, only from within
the system, and what can be communicated is, by definition, part of the
system’.73
Well, politics isn’t that straightforward. One can describe the condi-
tion of exploitation for creative workers. In so doing, a description is be-
ing made of activities that are located ‘outside’ the discourse of creative
industries. But such an observation in itself doesn’t change the system,
at least not in terribly meaningful ways. In the case of the creative in-
dustries, the outside understood in terms of a logic of immanence func-
tions in different ways than if it were understood in terms of systems
theory. On the one hand, this chapter is attempting to do exactly what
systems theory does: map the network of relations that constitute the
system of ‘creative labour’ within the creative industries. But in think-
ing of the outside as a force that is ‘a difference which can make a differ-
ence’ (Bateson), the composition of the creative industries is opened to

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the potential of what Deleuze and Guattari term ‘deterritorialization’,

‘reterritorializing’ or recomposing as differently situated arrangement
of forces, interests, possibilities. The process of immanent critique prob-
ably doesn’t mean changing the way the creative industries go about
empire building; it may slightly change the terms of reference within
the creative industries, but probably not. In my view the best thing such
a difference (of critical creative labour) could do is invent new institu-
tions forms. The conditioning force for this form of creative expression
rests precisely in the ways that labour is situated as a constitutive out-
side to the creative industries, understood as those activities, discourses
and institutional practices inscribed as intellectual property. Deleuze’s
distinction between exteriority and the outside helps clarify how I un-
derstand the relation between creative labour and the creative indus-
tries.
Drawing on Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge,74 Deleuze gives the
example of the keyboard and its letters and their relationship to a state-
ment. The keyboard and the letters are a ‘visibility’, yet they are not a
statement: ‘They are external to the statement but do not constitute its
outside’.75 The keyboard is a ‘concrete assemblage’ which realizes ‘rela-
tions between forces’. The keyboard, in a sense, awaits the force of the
outside. The keyboard, as we know, is a component within various com-
munications media – typically the typewriter or computer. Statements
that may emerge from the typewriter are conditioned by an articulation
with other forms of exteriority, both human and non-human: a desk,
a chair, a human, a burning cigarette, an empty cup of coffee, etcetera.
The articulation between these singular entities holds no essential rela-
tionship. Rather, the concrete assemblage – the articulation of parts –
is an actualization of ‘relations that are external to their terms’.
The articulation between the human and the machine – what Jünger
termed an ‘organic construction’, Benjamin a ‘mimetic correspondence’,
and McLuhan ‘the extensions of man’ – also holds the potential to cre-
ate, to compose. The force of the outside creates what Deleuze calls a
‘diagram’ of ‘topological’ relations in which ‘the inside is constituted by
the folding of the outside’.76 The fold consists of a ‘doubling’ of relations
of force between inside and outside.77 The fold constitutes a zone of
life (‘subjectivation’), ‘inventing new “possibilities of life”’ and new
capacities of expression.78 Media and cultural theorists who speak of

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‘global capital, global production, global labor migrations, and global

penetration by technologies of communications’ in terms of a ‘global
immanence’ that has ‘no outside’ are taking, at best, a lazy shortcut to
a mode of critique that dispenses with the ethico-political diagram of
power and reflexivity that makes possible the very objects of study they
wish to critique.79

Comparative Media Theory and the Constitutive Outside

Just as language has an outside – the limit of language, as noted in the
epigraph by Deleuze – so too does the creative industries have an out-
side. To paraphrase Deleuze: creative industries’ outside is not outside
the creative industries, it is the outside of creative industries. The out-
side of the creative industries is the limit of critique from within. The
limit of creative industries is defined by critique from the outside,
which is at once a part of the constitutive dimension of the creative in-
dustries. The kind of critique I am proposing is one that addresses the
multiplicity of outsides of the creative industries: these include the situ-
ation of creative labour in new media industries. This is living labour
whose function, at least within the discourse of the creative industries,
is to generate ip in order that it can be exploited. It is labour’s internal
outsides that operate on lines of class, ethnicity, age and gender.80 Each
of the components that constitute the plane of creative industries – aca-
demics, students, government, local business, service staff, new media
workers, along with various media of communication and techniques
of expression – has its own plane or logic of operation. Each of these
components populates the plane of creative industries, and the rela-
tions between them are external to their terms. That is, each component
or element functions within its own universe of sensibility, its own
horizon of reference, its own system of communication.
It is useful to think of the operation of these components in terms of
paradigms that are located on a larger plane of organization. While each
paradigm has its own distinctive features, they hold the potential to
interleave with each other. Within Marxian negativity, the potential for
correspondence is predicated on an underlying socio-aesthetic antago-
nism. Within the Deleuzian logic of immanence, the interrelationship
between component parts can be understood as the affirmation of
difference. And within comparative media theory, the communication

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or articulation between different actors is constituted through an ‘inter-

nally generative’ process that is situated within an external context.81
In each case, the point of intersection is a combination of antagonism,
affirmation and constitution. What brings these three processes togeth-
er is a notion of the outside. Such an assemblage signals the limits of
critique from within.
In order to illustrate these points, I detour through the work of Cana-
dian political economist and communications theorist, Harold A.
Innis.82 In his essay ‘Orality in the Twilight of Humanism’, Ian Angus
describes Innis’s method as one of ‘micrology’: ‘He focuses on character-
istic events within a society. He doesn’t begin by characterizing the
whole but from specific events, giving us a plurality of glimpses of these
specific events, creating a montage effect that implies the nature of the
whole’.83 Explaining the relation between institutions, knowledge mo-
nopolies, and communications media in Innis’s interpretation of socie-
ty, Angus writes: ‘Institutions are based on a medium of communica-
tion that is the most significant within that institution, which “monop-
olizes” knowledge through monopolizing access to, and use of, that
medium of communication’.84 Clearly, the creative industries are not
a communications medium per se; they are, nevertheless, a cluster of in-
stitutional forms and discursive practices articulated with various me-
dia of communication (film and tv, digital technologies, architecture,
photography, the arts and crafts, and so forth). Thus the creative indus-
tries do not utilize any single medium, but a combination of media
forms, each with its own rules and capacities of expression. What
bridges these communications media and their attendant practices is
a combination of the juridical and economic architecture of intellectual
property (primarily copyright) and the labour-power which it sub-
sumes. As long as media corporations, government departments and
university programmes see the exploitation of intellectual property as
the means of wealth creation, the institutional effect is a monopoly of
knowledge and a disregard of the desires of creative labour for self-sus-
taining work practices – technics of labour that are not subject to the
vagaries of the politically motivated inequality of free trade agreements
or fluctuating currency rates that determine the transnational move-
ment of film and tv drama production, for example.

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 creative industries

What Innis calls the ‘bias’ of communication can be understood in

terms of a constitutive outside. Innis’s central thesis is encapsulated in
his book, The Bias of Communication: the duration and expansion of
empires can be understood in terms of communications media and
transport technologies peculiar to any culture, location, and epoch, and
the attendant ‘bias’ towards either time or space that such media and
technologies invariably have.85 In his survey of the rise and fall of the
city-states of ancient civilizations and the economies of modern nation-
states, Innis considers a bias toward space or time as a defining feature
of ‘the monopoly of knowledge’, and hence control, by the hegemon.
At the end of his book Empire and Communications, Innis summarizes
the operation and characteristics of communications media in terms of
the monopoly of knowledge, or bias, they enable:

Monopolies of knowledge had developed and declined partly in rela-

tion to the medium of communication on which they were built, and
tended to alternate as they emphasized religion, decentralization,
and time; or force, centralization, and space.86

Innis also charts the ways in which colonial empires and nation-states
in the industrial era were defined by the dependency of the metropole
on the capacity of the colonies to supply staple products that can then
be processed into commodity objects and energy resources in the metro-
pole, distributed back out to the colonies, and traded across empires.
This relationship created its own peculiar structural dynamic of power.
As Ian Angus and Brian Shoesmith put it, ‘These conditions of produc-
tion meant, in fact, that the margins continually subsidised the cen-
tre’.87 Dependency theory is based on the logic, then, of a core/periphery
model of geopolitics and political economy.
Despite the extensive critique dependency theory has attracted,
particularly by postcolonial theorists preoccupied with identifying in-
stances of liminality, hybridity and ambivalence, and hence resistance
within colonial discourse, Innisian dependency theory continues to
hold importance with regard to issues of power and politics as they re-
late to communications media and the organization of social relations.
Unlike dependency models developed in world-systems theory and area
studies, within Innis’s framework a dependency relationship is not

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automatically a unilinear one where the ruling colonial power exerts

unmitigated control over its colonial territories. Such a relationship
assumes that the margins of empire are always subject to the economic,
political and cultural influences, authority and support of the centre.
Moreover, it overlooks the ways in which ‘centres are as much depend-
ent on their margins as margins are on the centres’.88 Innis paid atten-
tion to the multilayered dynamic and the interrelationships between
centres and margins, and his concepts of space, time and technological
bias provided the basis upon which to locate the pivotal role played by
communications media in the constitution of social relations. As Angus
has noted, it is a mistake to see such a ‘method of investigation’ as one
of technological determination:

It is not the claim that the media of communication determine the

form of the society, but rather the suggestion that investigation of
the constitutive elements of a society as media of communication,
shows that the micrological organisation prefigures and articulates
the macrological structure.89

At first glance, the spatial or temporal ‘bias’ of different media, the rela-
tionship between ‘centres’ and ‘margins’, and the ‘efficiency’ or ‘ineffi-
ciency’ of communication in conditioning the success of empires are
characteristics that can be explicated through the logic of negative
dialectics. As Judith Stamps has argued, Innis’s method of analysis
proceeds by a series of juxtapositions ‘in a manner comparable to the
constellations created by Adorno, Benjamin, and McLuhan’.90 Innis’s
approach departed, however, from his Frankfurt School counterparts in
ways that signalled his attention to the problems of his own geopoliti-
cal and cultural situation. ‘Unlike them’, writes Jody Berland, ‘Innis
found himself poised between two conflicting dispositions: the bleak,
post-totalitarian, anti-scientistic and post-enlightenment vision exem-
plified by Adorno’s “negative dialectics” versus the more pragmatic
nation-building culturalist modernity of his own milieu’.91
In foregrounding the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ attributes of different
communications media and their capacity to engender time or space-
binding societies, Innis read the sensory imbalance of Western civiliza-
tion against those premodern civilizations that had flourished due to

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a ‘balance’ between oral and aural media and visual media of print and
the written word. A balance or ‘efficiency’ in communication deter-
mined the efficacy and longevity of an empire. Innis was especially at-
tentive to the spatial bias of Western modernity, which, since the inven-
tion of the printing press, had consolidated a monopoly of ‘sensory life’,
resulting in a visual bias that corresponded ‘with the hegemony of mod-
ern science’.92 In the event of one medium of communication dominat-
ing others, a stasis will prevail that prevents an ‘openness’ to creativity
and thought. Print media, for example, have a spatial bias that empha-
sizes a preoccupation with administration, law and immediacy, neglect-
ing aspects of continuity, tradition and systems of belief – features of
media that are durable over time.93 Innis’s interest, then, was to study
the material characteristics of different media of communication in
order to ‘appraise its influence in its cultural setting’.94 His concern was
for a ‘co-existence of different media of communication’, so that the bias
of one may be ‘checked’ against the bias of another, creating ‘conditions
favourable to an interest in cultural activity’.95
Innis’s insight was to point to the ways in which a technological bias
towards time, for instance, results in a weakness or vulnerability with
respect to the capacity to effectively control space. In one example,
Innis describes how the art of horsemanship, the cross-breeding of
horses, and the technology of the stirrup and chariot made successful
invasion possible by the Hittites, and later the Assyrians, of ancient
Babylonia, whose primary technology was the clay tablet: a medium of
writing made possible by the discovery of rich deposits of alluvial
clay.96 The stirrup and chariot are technologies of space and speed, since
they enable the rapid transport of cavalry and fighting units across
territories. The clay tablet, on the other hand, is a technology of time,
and played a key role in establishing the durability of the city-state of
Babylon as one characterized by a centralized system of religious gover-
nance whose monopoly of knowledge extended over time.97 Irrespec-
tive of whether the resulting bias of a medium of communication is a
temporal or spatial one, certain monopolies of knowledge constituted
in institutional form will follow in its wake. This is precisely what hap-
pened in the case of the Hittite and Assyrian invaders, whose initial suc-
cesses were conditioned by the weakness in the Babylonian’s attention
to space and its attendant military problems as a result of their monop-

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oly of knowledge over time. Interestingly, the Hittite and Assyrian em-
pires were to prove relatively short lived due to their inefficient means
of communication: ‘Their attempts to build up new organizations of
space in relation to an organization of time were defeated by the
entrenched organizations of time in Babylon and Thebes’.98 That is, the
Hittite and Assyrian periods of rule were ultimately unstable since they
were unable to achieve an effective balance in communication. This
was matched by insufficient institutional infrastructures that facilitate
the organization and control of social relations. In this sense, the
Hittites and Assyrians do not qualify as proper empires in Innis’s terms.
Within Innis’s notions of ‘bias’ and ‘dependency’, one can detect the
operation of a constitutive outside. To go back to the example of the
Hittites with their innovations in iron and use of horse-drawn chariots,
and the Babylonians and their clay tablets: the bias toward time of the
Babylonian city-state is only made apparent when it is ‘checked’ against
the bias toward space of the Hittites. The communicative bias articulat-
ed by each of these cultures is a virtual one of pure potential, subsisting
within a plane of immanence until it is actualized through a plane of or-
ganization. ‘The plane is not a principle of organization’, write Deleuze
and Guattari, ‘but a means of transportation’.99 The relations between
these two planes are variously antagonistic, affirmative and constitu-
tive. The ‘external form’ of one communicative arrangement ‘inter-
leaves’ with another, and in so doing their respective bias toward time
or space is expressed in material ways via the constitutive force of the
outside. As Innis writes: ‘Without a consistently efficient system of
writing and the stabilizing conservative influence of religion, the Hit-
tite Empire was exposed to difficulties from within and without’.100
Angus explains how a comparative media theory is derived from the
interrelationships between immanence, outside, inside and the expres-
sive capacities of communications media as follows:

[W]hile there is an immanent history of media forms, there is also

a transcendental history of the constitution of media forms them-
selves. . . . Through this doubling, immanent history is turned
‘outside’ toward a wonder at the phenomenon of expression itself.101

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Through the force of the outside, we can see how the transformation of
the city-state of Babylon is conditioned by a plurality of ‘relations [that]
are external and irreducible to their terms’, as Deleuze deduces in his
study of Hume’s empiricism. Radical empiricism, as a diagrammatic
philosophy of relations, tells us something about the potential habitus
of a communications medium: it too ‘defines itself through the position
of a precise problem, and through the presentation of the conditions of
this problem’.102 There is nothing intrinsic about the medium of the
clay tablet that predisposes it toward a temporal bias. Certainly, as far as
its material properties go, clay was heavier and less transportable than
the substance of papyrus, as used by the ancient Egyptians. The repro-
duction of clay tablets is also less efficient than a substance like paper,
especially once paper became articulated with the printing press and
the political-economic need to administer mobile populations within
the external form of the nation-state at the onset of modernity in the
West. But there is nothing inherent about the material properties and
expressive capacities of alluvial clay deposits that determines its trans-
formation into the communications medium of the clay writing tablet.
Such a development is contingent upon the alignment of political, eco-
nomic and cultural forces that coalesce to address the problem at hand.

Conclusion
In this chapter I have sought to derive an understanding of the con-
stitutive force of the outside as it figures in relation to the creative in-
dustries, cultural criticism and comparative media theory. I have argued
that the force of the constitutive outside is what links these three ap-
proaches as social-technical idioms. Moreover, the constitutive outside
manifests in material ways and holds expressive capacities. In this
sense, the outside is not an impossibility, but a condition of possibility.
Furthermore, the outside is not a position, but rather a force of distrib-
uted power within social relations. This chapter has not been so inter-
ested in the ontological question of the outside (how can one be out-
side?), but rather the political question (how can change be made with-
in the dominant order?). In the case of the creative industries, the con-
stitutive outside is a force of relations characterized by two key features:
antagonism in the form of the exploitation of creative labour as it sub-
sists within a juridico-political architecture of intellectual property

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regimes; and the affirmation of creative labour that holds the potential
for self-organization in the form of networks.
As far as negative critique goes, the lineage between Adorno and
Deleuze stems from the notion of ‘immanent critique’. In a moment of
seeming optimism, Adorno considers the limit of immanent critique as
that which is embodied in the instant of the ‘leap’, though according to
Adorno, this is only made possible by the undertaking of negative di-
alectics.103 Following Deleuze, my interest has been in how immanent
critique can be read as an affirmative force that retains the act of cri-
tique. The limit of critique from within is not a closure or negation, but
rather an opening of possibilities. As Deleuze writes, ‘the outside is al-
ways an opening on to a future . . .’.104 It is in this sense that the affirma-
tion of living labour, for instance, conditions the possibility of creative
industries. But this transformative force of the outside is one that insti-
tutes a substantially different form of creative industries to the kind
that passes as dominant culture today.
Communications media play a vital role in securing the creative po-
tential of labour-power as a transformative force. As Angus reminds us:
‘Communication media thus constitute, through human labour, the
limits of what is experienceable and the manner in which it is experi-
enced in a social formation’.105 The spatial bias of the creative industries
as they currently stand is clearly apparent in their cartography of power
that seeks to exploit the ip generated by creative labour. Such empire
building is done at the expense of nurturing creative development over
time.

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4 Creative Labour
and the Role of Intellectual Property

This chapter reports on the survey I conducted for a session on ‘Intellec-

tual Property – Intellectual Possibilities’ organized by Kate Crawford
and Esther Milne for the fibreculture network of new media research
and culture meeting in 2003.1 I wanted to explore in some empirical
fashion the relationship between intellectual property (ip) and creative
labour. Such a relationship is the basis for defining what is meant by
creative industries, according to the seminal and much cited mapping
document produced by Blair’s Creative Industries Task Force (citf). De-
spite the role ip plays in defining and providing a financial and regulato-
ry architecture for the creative and other informational or knowledge
industries, there is remarkably little attention given by researchers and
commentators to the implications of ip in further elaborating conceptu-
al, political and economic models for the creative industries. There is
even greater indifference towards addressing the impact of exploiting
the ip of those whose labour-power has been captured: young people, for
the most part, working in the creative and culture industries. Angela
McRobbie’s work is one of the few exceptions.2
At a different level, I was curious to see how a mailing list might con-
tribute in a collaborative fashion to the formation of a research inquiry
in which the object of study – creative labour and ip – is partially deter-
mined by the list itself. Finally, after levelling critiques at various times
and occasions against what Terry Flew identifies as the ‘new media em-
pirics’,3 I thought it necessary to engage in a more direct way with this
nemesis-object: what, after all, can a new media empirics do and be-
come when it is driven through a processual model of media and com-
munications? I will address this question in the concluding section of
this chapter.
As I noted in the previous chapter: The list of sectors identified as
holding creative capacities in the citf Mapping Document include: film,
music, television and radio, publishing, software, interactive leisure
software, design, designer fashion, architecture, performing arts, crafts,
arts and antique markets, architecture and advertising. The Mapping

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Document seeks to demonstrate how these sectors consist of ‘activities

which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and
which have the potential for wealth and job creation through genera-
tion and exploitation of intellectual property’.4 The citf’s identification
of intellectual property as central to the creation of jobs and wealth
firmly places the creative industries within informational and knowl-
edge economies.
In posting the survey questionnaire to the list, I was interested in
ascertaining the following:

1. The extent to which respondents perceived their primary activities

(activities other than eating, sleeping, watching tv, having sex,
substance abuse, etcetera – though I guess many would argue that
they are indeed primary activities, and perhaps also creative ones!) to
correspond with ‘creativity’, however that term might be understood
(the survey synopsis clearly framed creativity in relation to the
creative industries discourse, so the latitude for interpreting the term
creativity was relatively circumscribed).
2. Whether a very partial mapping of the fibreculture network pro-
duced results similar to the sectors identified in the citf Mapping
Document. Whatever the results, I was interested in what they
might then say about national, regional or state manifestations of
the creative industries: are Australia’s creative industries the same as
the uk? Is there a temporal factor at work? That is, given the time of
development, incubation, and so forth, would a mapping exercise
produce different results depending of when and how it was con-
ducted? In other words, how does the stability of the empirical object
– creative labour – relate to the contingencies of time? This is as
much a methodological question as it is a question of politics and
ethics.
3. To establish whether respondents perceived or understood an extant
relationship between their labour and intellectual property.
4. To find out whether ip in the workplace is considered a political
issue.

At the time of the survey, the fibreculture mailing list had just over 700
subscribers (June, 2003). All responses were posted on the same day

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 creative labour

I posted the survey, most within a few hours of it appearing on list. This
in itself perhaps says something interesting about the ‘attention econo-
my’ of email lists and the time in which any posting may receive a
response – while the Stones could sing about the redundancy of news-
papers after a day, do list postings have a life of three or so hours? Not
so bad actually, though it’s probably much less – more like seconds,
depending on whether a post is read or not.
Of the 700 or so subscribers, then, I received seven responses. That’s
1 per cent of all list subscribers, a lovely sample to be sure. One of the
respondents provided a follow-up response as well. There was one other
query from someone asking whether they could do the survey even
though they thought they weren’t a creative worker; they were a copy-
right lawyer – a category Richard Florida assigns to ‘creative profession-
als’ – ‘business and finance, law, health care and related fields’, as dis-
tinct from the core Creative Class: ‘People in science and engineering,
architecture and design, education, art, music and entertainment,
whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology and/or
new creative content’.5 Curiously, there is no mention – at least in this
initial definition – of the role intellectual property plays in constituting
a ‘creative class’.6 No doubt there are national-cultural and social-politi-
cal explanations for the differences between how creative workers are
perceived and constituted in the uk and North America. To my knowl-
edge, there is yet to be a study that inquires into the different national
and regional formations of creative industries, classes, economies and
cultures. One could argue that oecd research papers and reports along
with those by neo-conservative, libertarian think-tanks such as Demos
and the Cato Institute do such work; however, while they certainly
compile statistics and bring a dual mode of commentary and hyperbole
to such figures, they do very little by way of historical, political, eco-
nomic and cultural analysis of the variable conditions that have led to
the emergence of creative labour and its attendant industries across
these geopolitical regions.

Reflexivity and Empirical Research

While the sample I am drawing on is most certainly small, it is not
insignificant. Indeed, I think its minutiae correspond to larger patterns
of creative labour in Australia, and most probably elsewhere, as I extrap-

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organized networks

olate below. Much of the current, more reflexive literature on quantita-

tive, empirical research argues that the fuss over sample sizes (for in-
stance the need to have a large sample if the claims and results are to
have any scholastic purchase on the phantasm of veridicality) is prob-
lematic in all sorts of ways. For instance, at what point can one say a
sample is representative of the community, user-consumers, demo-
graphic or social-technical network under analysis? As Pierre Bourdieu
argued so acutely and with such verve, public opinion does not exist.7
What exists, for Bourdieu, is the discursive form of the survey or opin-
ion poll, the interests that drive it, and the ends to which it is put. Of
course my own survey is not immune from the sort of critical, theoreti-
cal and political interests I bring to the analysis of responses.
Then there is the whole pseudo-scientific language of ‘observation’,
as though there might have ever been some sort of impartiality under-
pinning the process of enacting the survey. Lash associates such a para-
digm with ‘reflective modernization’ and the work of Giddens, Haber-
mas and Parsonian structural functionalism and linear systems theory:
‘The idea of reflective belongs to the philosophy of consciousness of the
first modernity. . . . To reflect is to somehow subsume the object under
the subject of knowledge. Reflection presumes apodictic knowledge and
certainty. It presumes a dualism, a scientific attitude in which the sub-
ject is in one realm, the object of knowledge in another’.8 In contrast to
a reflective first modernity, Lash posits a reflexive second modernity
and non-linear systems of communication and risk comprised of quasi-
objects and quasi-subjects and their theorization by the likes of Luh-
mann, Beck and Latour, along with Castells’ network logic of flows:

Second modernity reflexivity is about the emergent demise of the dis-

tinction between structure and agency altogether. . . . Second-moder-
nity reflexivity presumes a move towards immanence that breaks
with the [ontological] dualisms of structure and agency. . . .
The reflexivity of the second modernity presumes the existence of
non-linear systems. Here system dis-equilibrium and change are
produced internally to the system through feedback loops. These
are open systems. Reflexivity now is at the same time system de-
stabilization.9

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 creative labour

The extent to which reflexive non-linear systems wholly dispense with

or depart from a constitutive outside in favour of a logic of immanence
is a problematic I have begun to question with other fibreculture mem-
bers in a posting to the list of an early version of this chapter.10 Like the
question of and tension between new media empirics and processual
media theory, it is a problematic I will return to in my concluding re-
marks.
I think one reason I received even seven responses had much to do
with prior knowledge and trust established between myself as ‘observer’
and the ‘participants’ in this survey: that is, I had either met or knew
very well six of the seven respondents. Here, it is worth turning again to
Bourdieu, who frames the concept of reflexivity in particularly succinct
terms: ‘What distresses me when I read some works by sociologists is
that people whose profession is to objectivize the social world prove so
rarely able to objectivize themselves, and fail so often to realize that
what their apparently scientific discourse talks about is not the object
but their relation to the object’.11 Put in terms of non-linear systems
theory, the on- and off-line relationships, trust and symbolic economy
I had established largely through an online network operated as a feed-
back loop into the call for interest in and responses to this current sur-
vey. Obvious as it may sound, this very historical and social dimension
to a communicative present actively destabilizes any rhetorical claims
that I might attempt in the name of conducting a survey that follows
the scientific principles of objectivity and impartiality and methodolo-
gies befitting quantitative research. The only thing that is remotely im-
partial about this survey is the anonymity of the respondents as I pres-
ent them here.
Feedback loops further destabilize the very object-ness of this report
as a discrete posting to a mailing list in so far as anyone who responded
to this report breaks up components of the report by way of selective
quoting or paraphrasing and interjecting their own critiques or com-
ments.12 Many of us do this when we reply to an email, separating the
sender’s text from our own; in so doing, we are translating or mimick-
ing the effect of dialogue. Such a process is also registered in a material,
symbolic form in the partially dissipative, non-linear structure of dis-
cussion threads as the user recombines and shifts between postings,
disrupting what otherwise appears as a condition of equilibrium within

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organized networks

the linear organization of the archive. Further registration of feedback

loops are made in the ‘Googlization’ of this combinatory knowledge and
information formation, where any particular posting has the potential
to move up the vertical scale of ‘hits’ depending on the key words used
in the user’s search, the online links made to the posting, and the popu-
larity of the posting: in short, the coding of the Google software pro-
gram plays a determining role in the hierarchization of information
that is then further shaped by the interests and habits of users. The
economy and architecture of the Google search engine has been subject
to considerable debate and discussion in mailing lists such as fibrecul-
ture and nettime, along with many other online fora, print and electron-
ic media. If the posting of this report, for example, were made on any
number of web conferencing systems, collaborative text filtering sites
or blogs, such as slashdot.org, indymedia.org, makeworld.org or discor-
dia.us, then a very different information architecture of feedback loops
would prevail. I will now engage the findings of the survey.

Creativity – What’s in a Name?

When I asked respondents what creative activities they engaged in, a
list of 4-6 fields, practices or sectors of creativity by any one person was
compiled. These included writing, performing and producing music;
writing academic and policy papers (considered by one respondent and
assumed by others as ‘creative endeavours’); photography; design (inter-
active, information, education); publishing and editing; new media arts
(dv, net.art, print, electronic music); painting; and creative writing.
Three things stand out for me here:

1. Irrespective of whether or not respondents went on to identify them-

selves as part of the creative industries project, however that might be
understood, the range of creative activities any single person might un-
dertake suggests that diversity rather than specialization is a defining
feature of creative workers. This isn’t to say that specialization doesn’t
occur in any particular idiom of creativity – I think it’s safe to assume
that it would, but rather that respondents were not limited to one par-
ticular set of creative skills, trainings, or passions. Thus these respon-
dents are clear exemplars of the so-called fragmented postmodern sub-

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 creative labour

ject, traversing a range of institutional locations and socio-cultural dis-

positions.

2. Most of the respondents are engaged in academic work either on a

full-time, continuing basis or as sessional, casual teachers. In both cases,
university related activities and non-university related activities were
understood as holding creative dimensions. If nothing else, the diversity
of creative activities identified by respondents indicates the complexity
of labour in the contemporary university, further suggesting that: (a)
the university cannot accommodate the diverse interests and economic
necessities of its constituent labour-power, and/or (b) that individuals
wish to distinguish between the kind of work they do at university and
its concomitant values and the kind of work they do outside the univer-
sity, or (c) that there is zone of indistinction, if you will, between the
university and its so-called outside, given that all sectors of cultural pro-
duction and intellectual labour are today subject to market economies.
The extent to which tensions exist between these realms, or whether
they are better characterized as a sort of zone of indistinction that can-
not be reduced in such a manner, varies, I suspect, according to the con-
tingencies of time, interests, values, labour conditions, age, class, and
gender of individuals as they are located in different institutional set-
tings. Each of the above possibilities corresponds with the economic
and labour conditions peculiar to the creative industries operating in
the uk, as McRobbie explains:

Those working in the creative sector cannot simply rely on old work-
ing patterns associated with art worlds, they have to find new ways
of ‘working’ the new cultural economy, which increasingly means
holding down three or even four ‘projects’ at once. In addition, since
these projects are usually short term, there have to be other jobs to
cover the short-fall when the project ends. The individual becomes
his or her own enterprise, sometimes presiding over two separate
companies at the same time.13

3. There is much overlap between this list of creative activities and the
citf’s list of creative sectors, with the exception that traditional arts and
crafts and antiques do not figure in the former; this comes as no sur-

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prise, given that the survey was conducted on a listserv for critical Inter-
net research and culture. As for how this list relates to Richard Florida’s
composition of the Creative Class in the usa, there is an obvious absence
in my survey of engineers and scientists. Again, you might say this
should come as no surprise; one could, however, describe software
programmers, ‘codeworkers’ and game designers as computer scientists
or information engineers – though no doubt there would be some
disciplinary and perhaps ontological dispute over this.

Having established that they all are engaged in creative activities of one
kind or another, there were then considerable differences among re-
spondents as to whether they perceived themselves as engaged in the
creative industries. Two respondents said they didn’t – one being a bit
hesitant as to whether they did or not, the other indifferent, implying
the term was no more than a ‘tag’ associated with ‘official places’ and
‘certain faculties’. Four respondents stated that they did associate their
activities with the creative industries, some more emphatically so than
others. One of those responded by writing ‘Yeah, but I’m a special case
:)’, indicating that creativity, at least for this person, comes with a sense
of individuality, difference and exception. Yet such subjectivities carry
more baggage than this. As McRobbie notes, ‘Individualization is not
about individuals per se, as about new, more fluid, less permanent social
relations seemingly marked by choice or options. However, this conver-
gence has to be understood as one of contestation and antagonism’.14
Much of this chapter seeks to unravel various tensions that underpin
labour practices within the creative industries.
A seventh respondent took a more reflexive, Marxian and historical-
ly informed position, choosing to problematize and open up the ques-
tion in the following way: ‘All industry is creative; all human activity
creates something; and nearly all human activity is subsumed under
industrial imperatives (including the consumption of media and other
products). Therefore I think this is probably a question whose answer is
presupposed in the historical facts of its own terms’. On these grounds,
then, irrespective of whether respondents did or didn’t identify their
creative activities with the creative industries, there is a sense among
these respondents that there is an ‘idea’ of what constitutes the creative
industries, and any particular respondent’s identification with those

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industries is based, perhaps, on whether one meets the criteria or fits

into the discursive boundaries, categories, or ethos of the creative
industries, as established in part in the survey’s preamble.

Intellectual Property and Creativity

The importance of intellectual property (copyrights, patents, trade-
marks) as a source of income was met with a mixed response. For one
person it was important, for the rest it wasn’t, at least in an exclusive
sense: labour was paid for on an hourly basis or ip was assigned to the
company or publisher commissioning the work; in other instances
remuneration from ip contributed to a respondent’s income, but wasn’t
relied upon as a primary source of income. Creative workers were thus
primarily alienated from their intellectual property in one form or
another. Such responses clearly signal a tension and power relationship
between creative workers and their employers with regard to the citf
definition of creative industries as those activities that have ‘the poten-
tial for wealth and job creation through generation and exploitation of
intellectual property’. Thus despite all the rhetoric around information-
al and creative labour consisting of ‘horizontal’ and ‘fluid’ modes of pro-
duction, distribution and exchange, clearly there remain vertical, hier-
archical dimensions within the ‘New Economy’. If ip is to function as
the mainstay of capital accumulation within informational economies,
it doesn’t take much imagination to foresee industrial, legal and politi-
cal dispute focussing on the juridico-political architecture of ip. The ex-
tent to which workers are able to mobilize their potential power in an
effective manner (that is, in a way that protects and secures their inter-
ests while inventing new political information architectures) depends,
I would suggest, on their capacity to organize themselves as a social-
political force. I will address this issue in relation to the problem of
immaterial labour in more detail below.
Respondents found ip a source of tension not only at the level of
financial remuneration; a tension prevailed around the concept of ip as
well. In response to the question of whether intellectual property is
important as a principle – that is, as a system or framework consisting
of rules and beliefs that enables the transformation of labour into legal,
moral and potentially economic values – one person stated that they
found it of no importance at all. All others found it was, though the re-

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organized networks

sponse, as expected, was mixed: ‘Yes, but in a negative sense. The whole
structure of ip has turned into a perversion of its intended principles:
namely, that alienation rather than one’s inalienable rights in one’s
own work is the guiding principle of ip law. Put differently, rights are
seen to exist only so that they can be sold. That is a function of capital,
long since dead. I would prefer a rights structure that existed to ensure
the free flow of ideas’. In a similar vein, though without the libertarian
overtone, another respondent writes: ‘It is important to me as a princi-
ple to be critiqued, developed and (in some cases) rejected. The arm of ip
is extending in several directions and in many industries – and it’s that
reach that needs to be reviewed with some urgency’.
A third respondent strongly rejected the idea that ip might be under-
stood in terms of principles: ‘No’, they write, ‘It’s important to me as a
discursive field!’ By my reading, such a statement suggests that the re-
spondent understands principles as holding some kind of unchanging,
transcendental and universal status, while a discursive field is histori-
cally and culturally mutable and holds the potential for local interven-
tion by actors endowed with such capacities. (A similar distinction is
often made in philosophy between the universality of morals and the
contingencies of ethics.) The idea of ip as a discursive field rather than
a principle is also interesting in relation to the second response tabled
above, which implies that limits need to be established with regard to ip
and the extent to which it governs areas of life previously outside a mar-
ket economy. Current debates around patenting the human genome,
database access to dna information on sperm and embryo composition
and their relationship to insurance premiums and future employment
possibilities (see Gattica for the filmic version of this scenario), and the
pressure on developing countries to import gm food coupled with un-
even, neo-colonial trade agreements along with clientelistic conditions
imposed by the World Bank and imf’s structural adjustment and debt
management policies are the most obvious examples that come to mind
here.15 These are issues I discussed in chapter 1.

Intellectual Property and the Labour Contract

The tensions associated with ip was further extended to the work-
place, with all but one of the respondents noting that they had heard of
and in some instances personally experienced conflicts over ip issues.

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 creative labour

If such accounts are the norm rather than the exception, this clearly
signals a need for much greater attention to be given to the role of ip in
the workplace, and the status it holds as a legal and social architecture
governing the conditions of creative production, job satisfaction,
employer-employee relations and thus life in general. While only two
respondents reported losing a job or contract for refusing to assign ip to
their employer, many commented on the problems of such a condition
– as one person noted: ‘This is common in film music now: if you don’t
sell your rights to the film maker, you are not given the contract’. Could
this be a point at which to engage ‘the refusal of work’ – a political
concept and strategy developed by radical workers’ movements of the
1960s in Italy?
The Italian autonomists of the 1960s and ’70s sought to liberate work
from relations of waged labour and the capitalist State, to unleash ‘a
mass defection or exodus’ and in so doing subtract the labour-power
which sustains the capitalist system, affirming the ‘creative potential of
our practical capacities’ in the process.16 There’s a bit of a different rub,
however, in a capitalist logic of post-Fordist flexible accumulation,
whose modes of social and political regulation set the scene for our cur-
rent informational paradigm. While the worker within Fordist systems
of assembly-line mass production and mass consumption conditions
the possibility of, to refer to the classic example, the assemblage of
motor vehicles that, ideally, are then sold to the leisurely consumer
who built the vehicle in their eight hour working day, the case of ip and
creative labour operates in substantially different ways.
Within an informational paradigm, the appropriation of labour-
power by capitalists does not result in a product so much as a potential.
This potential takes the ‘immaterial’ form of intellectual property
whose value is largely unquantifiable and is subject to the vagaries of
speculative finance markets, ‘New Economy’ style. Thus, in the case of
government institutions that don’t recognize an individual’s ip rights,
there is nothing to ‘hand over’ in the first instance. That is, the right to a
refusal of work is not possible; or put differently, the creative potential
of work, as registered in and transformed into the juridico-political
form of ip, is undermined by the fact that such a social relation – the
hegemonic form of legitimacy – is not recognized. As noted by another
respondent: ‘I don’t think you “lose” a contract for refusing to sign ip

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organized networks

over . . . it’s more like you never had it in the first place if you do work
for hire’. Instead, one does not so much refuse to work as decline to pro-
vide a service, whose economic value as wage labour – that is, labour
separated from its product – bears no relationship to the potential eco-
nomic value generated by the exploitation of ip. In effect, then, ‘creativi-
ty’ goes right under the radar. Prostitution functions in a similar man-
ner. One does not buy ‘love’ from the prostitute, one acquires a ‘service’
in the form of an orgasm, or ‘little death’, with no value in and of itself.
The prostitute’s love does not figure in the relationship; love is off the
radar. Like intellectual property, the expression of the orgasm in a given
form – sperm, for the male who appropriates the labour-power of the
prostitute – nevertheless holds the potential to translate into economic,
social, political and biological values if its eruption is arranged under
different conditions – the normative ones peculiar to heterosexual cou-
plings living in advanced economies, for example.
A couple of respondents, both now working in the higher education
sector, had mixed responses to the kind of conditions such a setting en-
abled vis-à-vis labour and ip. Respondent 1: ‘I would always give in [and
sign over ip] when I was self-employed, now I only take jobs where I’m
happy with the ip arrangements’. Such a position is possible when, as
noted earlier, producing ip for others (that is, employers/clients) is not
the primary source of income. Interestingly, the other respondent antic-
ipates conflicts over the assignation of ip within university settings –
Respondent 2: ‘As I continue to collaborate in university settings, the
problem will arise’. The problem of job security arises where ip policies
can vary substantially from university to university and at an intra-uni-
versity level, depending on the kind of contract an individual is able to
negotiate with management as universities undergo increasingly dereg-
ulation toward a system that destroys the legal concept of collective
wage agreements fought for by unions. For many working in the higher
education sector, the course materials staff produce are the intellectual
property of the university. These educational materials may often incor-
porate parts of articles or books they have written or are in the process
of writing. They may also include lists of references to articles and de-
bates located in open-access online repositories, as found in the fibrecul-
ture and nettime archives, for example. And here, a curious institution-
al tension over ip emerges: depending on the publisher, the ip of articles

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and books an individual writes will more often than not belong to the
publisher. One of the respondents noted how this problem of propri-
etary rights of academic ip has been dealt at their university: ‘The new ip
rules (e.g. the one which came into effect on 14th March [2003]) gives
the university ownership of all ip created by staff (with a “scholarly
work” exception). This creates major problems – for example, academ-
ics moving to different universities who intend to use educational mate-
rials they have developed previously’. Thus the extent to which ip func-
tions as an architecture of control is and has always been dubious at the
level of the everyday. Just think of what happened with the appearance
of the Xerox machine in university settings – in effect it became a free
license to appropriate the property of writers, with myriad staff and stu-
dents reproducing the pages of otherwise copyright-protected materials.
Even if the legal aspects of ip are frequently difficult if not impossible
to regulate, there are important symbolic dimensions to ip that have
implications and impacts at the level of subjectivities and their degree
of legitimacy within institutional and national settings. Here I am
thinking – yet again – of that rather chilling line in the citf’s definition
of the creative industries in which ip is not only generated, but more
significantly, it is exploited. Notwithstanding conventional use of the
term ‘exploitation’ within legislative and juridical considerations of
copyright, the exploitation of ip is not simply a matter of extracting the
potential economic value from some inanimate thing. The exploitation
of ip, let us never forget, is always already an exploitation of people, of
the producers of that which is transformed from practice into property,
which in its abstraction is then alienated from those who have pro-
duced it. While there are clear problems with such a system, iprs are not
necessarily a bad thing. As I argued in chapter 1, to simply oppose iprs
is not a political option. Individuals and communities must look for
ways in which iprs can be exploited for strategic ends. Such a political
manoeuvre is possible, for instance, in efforts to advance indigenous
sovereignty.17

Intellectual Property and (Dis)Organized Labour

Most of the respondents corrected the assumption in my question on
the relationship between collaborative production and the difficulty of
assigning ip rights to individuals or joint-authorship. Respondents not-

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organized networks

ed that corporations own the creative efforts of both individuals and

collaborations, since the corporation has paid for that work. This brings
me to the final component of the survey – the relationship between ip
and the problem of disorganized labour. It seems to me that unions are
among the best placed actors to contest the seemingly foregone conclu-
sion that corporations have an a priori hold on the appropriation of
labour-power. As Castells has noted:

[W]ith the acceleration of the work process [enabled by new ICTs],

worker’s defense continues to be a fundamental issue: they cannot
count on their employers. The problem is that the individualization
of management/worker relationships makes the use of traditional
forms of defense, in terms of collective bargaining and trade union-
led struggles, very difficult except in the public sector. Unions are
realizing this and finding new forms of pressure, sometimes in the
form of consumer boycotts to press for social justice and human
rights. Also, individual explosions of violence by defenseless workers
could be considered forms of resistance.18

However, there is an impasse of paradigmatic proportion to the poten-

tial for unions to assist workers – particularly younger workers – within
creative industries or knowledge and information economies. The so-
called strategy of consumer sovereignty is a relatively weak one, and
only further entrenches the problem of individualization inasmuch as
the potential for a coalition among workers is sidelined in favour of that
mantra urged on us by our politicians who are so keen to protect ‘the
national interest’ – yes, the national economy is fragile, so enjoy your-
self and go out and shop! There is a general perception that unions and
their capacity to organize labour in politically effective and socially
appealing ways are a thing of the past. To address this issue I will first
table comments from respondents. I will then move on to the thesis of
‘immaterial labour’, as presented by Maurizio Lazzarato, Hardt and
Negri, and argue why the condition of ‘disorganized labour’ more
accurately describes the circumstances in which labour finds itself
within an informational paradigm.
Three of the respondents stated they did not belong to a union, one
with perhaps a degree of ironic self-affirmation characteristic of what

146
 creative labour

Lash and Urry term ‘reflexive individualization’:19 ‘Nope’, writes one

person, ‘I’m a manager and self-employed :7’. In his book on globaliza-
tion, Beck identifies a nexus between those who work for themselves –
a mode of coordination he attributes to ‘life-aesthetes’ in particular –
and their desire for ‘self-development’. He goes on to suggest that such
dispositions lend themselves to ‘self-exploitation’: ‘People are prepared
to do a great deal for very little money, precisely because economic
advantage is individualistically refracted and even assigned an opposite
value. If an activity has greater value in terms of identity and self-ful-
filment, this makes up for and even exalts a lower level of income’.20
Voluntary and service labour by many artists within the cultural sector
would also fit this condition of self-exploitation.
Richard Caves prefers to explain the condition of non-union labour
in more economic terms. Citing the example of independent filmmak-
ing, Caves notes that ‘30 to 35 per cent of production costs [can be saved]
by operating a nonunion project’.21 In productions involving union
labour, most of these additional costs are a result, so Caves claims, of
inefficient and interventionist management practices and regulations
by unions, which sees workers being paid for standing around doing
nothing. Caves casts unions as manipulative entities who have a
propensity to ‘hold-up’ production unless their wage demands are
met.22 Certainly, the militancy of unions has long been a staple of news
narratives structured around a binary logic that has little time for artic-
ulating larger contextual forces and values that give rise to particular
actions. Irrespective of whether the political form is union or non-
union, issues of creative governance are always going to have local or
national peculiarities, and will vary from industry to industry. In every
case, however, the challenge for creative workers is, it seems to me, to
create work that holds not only the maximum potential for self-fulfil-
ment and group cooperation on a project, but just as importantly,
creative workers need to situate themselves in ways that close down the
possibility of exploitation.
The other respondents belonged to various unions or professional
organizations: National Tertiary Education Union (nteu) [2], Media,
Entertainment and Arts Alliance (meaa)/Australian Journalists’ Associa-
tion (aja) [2], the College Arts Association (usa) and Australasian Per-
forming Rights Association (apra), ‘which is not really a union, but is

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primarily concerned with ip’. All these respondents were aware of their
union’s policy on ip issues, though one respondent held a high level of
cynicism: ‘I’ve never heard a union take a credible position on ip’. The
follow-up question on the efficacy of unions in instances of dispute
with management over ip elicited further cynicism from another re-
spondent: ‘Unions are too stupid to do this properly. They are as much a
part of the problem since they agree to perverse work relations. Unions
are corporations’. Others noted that disputes of this nature were ‘an on-
going battle on many fronts’ and that ‘the meaa/aja newsletter often has
such stories. Most of it is so thoroughly covered in case law that the ma-
jor players don’t bother to buck the system. The case of us freelance
journos seeking payment for new media republication of their stories is
seminal’. The New York Times v Tasini case which this second respon-
dent refers to is notable for the successful class action filed in 1993 by
the National Writers Union (nwu) on behalf of freelance journalists
against The New York Times, which had resold and republished articles
electronically from their print archive and were refusing to pay free-
lance journalists for republication on the grounds that there was no dif-
ference in form between a print, microfilm or microfiche archive and
new archival and storage media such as online newspapers or maga-
zines, electronic databases such as LexisNexis or cd-roms.23 Despite the
us Supreme Court ruling in favour of Tasini in 2001, The New York Times
refused to compensate journalists and decided instead to delete all free-
lance written articles from their electronic archival media.
The New York Times v Tasini case prompts two key issues that I will
only flag here: firstly, material previously part of common repositories
of knowledge such as public libraries becomes subject to litigious socie-
ty within the political economy of a digital age, resulting in the erasure
of what would otherwise be a digital commons;24 and secondly, while
freelance journalists – that is, those who belong to the class of creative
labourers – obtained some success in this instance, New York Times v
Tasini foregrounds the continued importance the nation-state and its
domestic legal regimes hold for any analysis of information societies.
While digitally encoded information has the capacity to transcend the
borders of the nation-state, we are again reminded of the social-political
forces which shape our understanding of and relationship to media
technologies. Further, the social-technical condition of all communica-

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 creative labour

tions media is always already situated within specific discourse net-

works; the media situation in turn gives rise to the problematic of trans-
lation for media culture and its attendant labour practices and modes of
creation. To put it simply, while New York Times v Tasini set a legal
precedent for how media corporations are to go about republishing the
work of commissioned freelance journalists, such a ruling has no legal
bearing outside the usa in terms of how some of the very same trans-
national media conglomerates conduct their business practices in other
countries.
To summarize: while the majority of respondents did belong to one
or more unions, a good proportion of these respondents did not seem
satisfied with or have any great faith in the efforts of unions to negoti-
ate disputes over ip in the workplace.

Multitudes and the Exploitation of Network Sociality

The final question in the survey asked respondents if they thought
there was a need for workers in their field to become more organized,
particularly around the impact that ip has on their potential income.
One person said ‘yes’, and two others didn’t know. The remaining four
respondents took the opportunity to register more developed responses.
One person stated that ‘Musicians need a militant union. That said, the
old divisions of labour in what are generally considered “the creative
industries” (really the cultural industries) have broken down because of
technological changes’. Interestingly, this respondent correlates the
convergence of different media technologies with the demise of the pre-
vious markers of class distinction premised on the vertical organization
of labour within the culture industries. It has been commonplace since
the late 1990s to hear stories of musical entrepreneurs who simultane-
ously engage in the previously separated activities of production, distri-
bution and consumption. Yet such horizontal organization isn’t with-
out its own class distinctions that continue to operate in symbolic, eco-
nomic and political dimensions.
While the old divisions of labour may have been cast away, at least
within the advanced economies, this isn’t to say that new divisions of
labour haven’t taken their place. Indeed, the task of identifying new
divisions of labour within the creative industries and informational
economies has been one of the key underlying interests and motiva-

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tions behind this chapter. Such divisions are invoked by another

respondent:

I think the issue is broader than the impact on our ‘potential income’
as individual workers – perhaps this is already too close to the com-
modity rhetoric that has permeated the creative industries. Part of
the problem is that we are taught to respond to our projects as per-
sonally-owned intellectual products that must be protected, so that
we can drain the maximum profit from their use. This disguises sev-
eral processes that go into creative work. Open source programming
networks, for example, reveal other ways to interpret and develop
our intellectual labours.

Here we have it then, the return to the classic debate over closed regula-
tion versus open flows within a field of new ICTs. But there is more to it
in this instance. This respondent rightly observes that creativity is irre-
ducible to the generation and exploitation of ip. Herein lies a key ten-
sion that proponents of the creative industries face with a potential con-
stituency that in the majority of instances resides outside the institu-
tional borders of the university or a government department of creative
industries. This tension concerns the relationship between discourse
and identity formation. Just as the success of governments operating
within liberal democracies depends upon getting the right spin, so too
does the capacity for the creative industries project to obtain a purchase
with a variety of actors that include politicians and government depart-
ments, university officials, students, academics, industry managers and
creative producers. In other words, within a discursive regime of neolib-
eralism that grants hegemony to those with greater institutional, politi-
cal and economic purchase – for instance industry managers, govern-
ment departments, and university professors – there remains a constitu-
tive outside of creative and service workers with little or no political
representation.
Such a condition of ‘invisibility’ is symptomatic of the dependency
of capital on the commodity value of labour-power. It was on the basis
of this relationship between capital and labour-power that Italian radi-
cal leftists in the 1960s and ’70s such as Mario Tronti would observe
that ‘Labour is the measure of value because the working class is the condition

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of capital’.25 Within the workers’ movements of the 1960s, the class func-
tion to supply capital with labour-power and produce surplus value was
seen as the condition for dismantling and disarticulating the reproduc-
tion of capital.26 As noted earlier, the technique for undertaking this
action was referred to as the ‘refusal of work’ – a radical intervention
which unleashed the creative capacities of workers and affirmed their
‘right to nonwork’.27
Recognizing the political limitations of the unitary concept of class
within a post-industrial, post-colonial era, Hardt and Negri have spear-
headed the internationalization of the Italian autonomist concept of
‘the multitude’ – the movement of movements that goes beyond the tra-
ditional working classes who established political representation with-
in the institutional structures of trade unions and social-democratic
parties.28 Developed out of the activities Negri and others have with
officine precarie (non-unionized precarious, unpaid workers), the multi-
tude is a political, ‘post-representational’ and in some instances ethico-
aesthetic expression of those seeking to actualize another possible
world – ethnic and social minorities, women, exploited workers, ac-
tivists, leftist intellectuals, and so forth. Virno locates the multitude in
opposition to the Hobbesian concept of ‘the people’, which ‘is tightly
correlated to the existence of the State and is in fact a reverberation of
it’.29 Against the political unity and will of the ‘the people’, the multi-
tude’s ‘virtuosic’ heterogeneity – or ‘ensemble of “acting minorities”’ –
‘obstructs and dismantles the mechanisms of political representation’.30
Redefining the position of the multitude, Negri’s oral intervention at
a meeting of officine precarie in Pisa, 2003, is apposite on the correlation
between exploitation and creative labour, though in ways that contra-
dict his earlier thesis with Hardt that Empire has no outside:

The concept of the multitude can only emerge when the key founda-
tion of this process (the exploitation of labour and its maximal ab-
straction) becomes something else: when labour starts being regard-
ed, by the subjects in this continuous exchange of exploitation, as
something that can no longer enter the relation of exploitation.
When labour starts being regarded as something that can no longer
be directly exploited. What is this labour that is no longer directly
exploited? Unexploited labour is creative labour, immaterial, concrete

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labour that is expressed as such. Of course exploitation is still there,

but exploitation is of the ensemble of this creation, it is exploitation
that has broken the common [that is, abstract labour in a wage rela-
tion] and no longer recognises the common as a substance that is
divided, produced by abstract labour, and that is divided between
capitalist and worker in the structures of command and exploitation.
Today capital can no longer exploit the worker; it can only exploit
cooperation amongst workers, amongst labourers. Today capital has
no longer that internal function for which it became the soul of com-
mon labour, which produced that abstraction within which progress
was made. Today capital is parasitical because it is no longer inside; it is
outside of the creative capacity of the multitude.31

Now this a lengthy quotation to be sure, and I elect it at this particular

moment for its immense richness. I will attend to Negri and Hardt’s
work on immaterial labour in more detail shortly. At this stage, howev-
er, it is worth spending a little time unpacking some of Negri’s key
points, since they are commensurate with my larger critique of creative
industries and the role of intellectual property. It strikes me that Negri
is decidedly dialectical in his thinking of the relationship between capi-
tal and the multitude. What we read here is not talk of indeterminacy,
flows and zones of indistinction – the primary conceptual metaphors
used to describe the biopolitical operation of Empire; rather, there is a
return to the bad old language of dialectics, albeit without the full force
of its logic. If capital is no longer inside but outside the creative capacity
of the multitude, such a condition is made possible by the fact of its
relation with the inside of the multitude. Capital, then, operates as the
constitutive outside of the multitude, a social-technical body that,
according to Negri, has somehow escaped or transcended abstract
labour in a wage relation yet at the same time continues to exist in an
immanent relation with capital: ‘Exploitation is of the ensemble of
this creation’. So exploitation persists, but it is no longer the ‘direct’
exploitation of abstract labour. Rather, it is exploitation of ‘cooperation
among workers’; that is, it is an indirect exploitation of that which has
become ‘creative labour’. What does Negri mean by this? As I read him,
Negri is suggesting that capital – which supposedly is no longer inside –
exploits creative labour inasmuch as creative labour constitutes (pro-

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vides the enabling conditions for) capital’s new location outside ‘the
creative capacity of the multitude’. What Negri is saying, then, is that
nothing less than a revolution has taken place!
To speak of a revolution of our time – of a dramatic rupture from a
prior order, a transformation that historically has been characterized by
excessive violence and bloodshed – is a mistake. There has not been a
revolution. Rather, capital has transmogrified into an informational
mode of connections and relations, a mode that does not so much come
after industrial and post-industrial modes of production as incorporate
such modes within an ongoing logic of flexible accumulation. Within
an informational mode of connection, the creative capacity of the mul-
titude comprises a self-generating system in which abstract labour as a
wage relation is not so much replaced – for such a social-political rela-
tion is in fact very much a reality – as it is given a secondary role in
favour of what Andreas Wittel terms a ‘network sociality’ consisting
‘of fleeting and transient, yet iterative social relations; of ephemeral but
intense encounters’. Further:

In network sociality the social bond at work is not bureaucratic but

informational; it is created on a project-by-project basis, by the move-
ment of ideas, the establishment of only ever temporary standards
and protocols, and the creation and protection of proprietary infor-
mation. Network sociality is not characterized by a separation but by
a combination of both work and play. It is constructed on the
grounds of communication and transport technology.32

The conditions of work described here by Wittel join the refrain of char-
acteristics attributed to labour in the creative industries as seen in stud-
ies by leftist academics such as McRobbie, Andrew Ross, and Castells as
well as their libertarian counterparts like Caves, Florida, Leadbeater,
Howkins and Brooks. While these scholars and commentators do not
all use the term ‘creative industries’, they all describe similar patterns of
labour. This isn’t to say that creative labour is universally the same. Ear-
lier I suggested that we are yet to see a study that comparatively maps
the national characteristics of creative labour. Perhaps one reason such
a study is still to emerge has to do with the mistaken view often propa-
gated by creative industries’ commentators, policy-makers, new media

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critics, and global theorists alike that the nation-state is obsolete. One
thing a comparative study of creative labour in their national locales
would reveal is the role ip law has at the level of the nation-state within
an informational era. In accordance with the trips Agreement (1995),
member states are responsible for administering and governing ip law
within their respective territories. This is just one layer that distinguish-
es the manifestation of creative labour in one country from the next.
Other layers, or rather systems of arrangements, are defined by the
social-political, cultural, institutional and economic peculiarities of
locales, nation-states and regions and the multiple contingencies that
articulate creative labour in singular ways.
As I have been arguing, there are two key issues at stake for workers
undertaking creative labour within informational economies:

1. The mode and form of exploitation. For proponents of the creative

industries, this consists of the exploitation of ip. Wittel also alludes
to such a condition, noting that network sociality involves ‘the
creation and protection of proprietary information’, but he refrains
from engaging the political dimensions that underpin such activi-
ties. To the extent that the respondents to my survey provide an
index of abstract labour in the creative industries, then one can
contest Negri’s claim that creative labour has transcended modern
and postmodern forms of capitalism that function through the
exploitation of labour as a wage relation.
2. However different the articulations of creative labour may be, they
hold one thing in common: disorganization. The history of workers’
movements is a testament to the force of organization in contesting
the exploitation of labour by capital. The question is, can creative
labour organize itself within an informational mode of connection?

In describing the circumstances from which the multitude emerges,

Negri comes close to suggesting that creative labour is in fact organized:
Capital ‘can only exploit cooperation amongst workers, amongst labour-
ers’.33 Hardt strikes a similar tone in his earlier work on Deleuze: ‘Spin-
ozian democracy, the absolute rule of the multitude through the equali-
ty of its constituent members, is founded on the “art of organizing en-
counters”’.34 As I have suggested, Wittel’s notion of ‘network sociality’

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may be a more useful description of Hardt and Negri’s multitude: such a

social-technical formation is not so much directly exploited, as it is indi-
rectly exploited. ‘Content is not king’, as one Silicon Alley pr brochure in
1999 declared, ‘the user is’.35 Capital thus continues to exploit creative
labour, since its social mode is one of cooperation. If the various studies
of creative industries have got it right, then such cooperation takes the
form of emphemerality, fleeting, project-by-project engagements and
value adding personal relationships designed to enhance network
capital. The function of the creative worker is not to produce, but to set
new trends in consumption.36
Such activities are depicted well in the documentary film The Mer-
chants of Cool (2001), where Douglas Rushkoff narrates the busy lives of
‘trend-spotters’ and ‘cool-hunters’ who track down youth whose van-
guard sensibility for hip-consumerism is packaged and choreographed
through symbolic affiliations with major brands and their vehicles:
Sony, Pepsi-Cola, mtv, etcetera. ‘Cool’ youths, with their predilection
for creative-consumption, function as underpaid and exploited cultural
intermediaries for their less imaginative compatriots in consumerism.
As Tiziana Terranova notes, this kind of operation or process is not
about capital ‘incorporating’ some authentic, subcultural form that
somehow resides outside of capitalism’s media-entertainment complex.
Instead, it is a ‘more immanent process of channeling collective labor
(even as cultural labor) into monetary flows and its structuration with-
in capitalist business practices’.37
However, the social-political organization of creative labour requires
a radically different impetus that is yet to emerge. As one respondent
soberly puts it: ‘That organization is not going to take the role of unions
as we currently know them, who for the most part have no clue’. The
respondent elaborates this observation, or perhaps it was a perception,
with the following example: ‘I do know a young woman trying to effect
change in the union movement in nz [New Zealand] and organise cine-
ma workers . . . but finds the entrenched movement incredibly uninter-
ested in understanding the desires and motivations of the young people
working in these fields . . . which is a prereq [sic] for representing them
adequately’.

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organized networks

Immaterial or Disorganized Labour?

Lazzarato defines the emergent and simultaneously hegemonic form
of immaterial labour ‘as the labour that produces the informational and
cultural content of the commodity’.38 Lazzarato discerns ‘two different
aspects’ within immaterial labour:

On the one hand, as regards the ‘informational content’ of the com-

modity, it refers directly to the changes taking place in workers’
labor processes in big companies in the industrial and tertiary
sectors, where the skills involved in direct labor are increasingly
skills involving cybernetics and computer control (and horizontal
and vertical communication). On the other hand, as regards the
activity that produces the ‘cultural content’ of the commodity,
immaterial labor involves a series of activities that are not normally
recognized as ‘work’ – in other words, the kinds of activities involved
in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes,
consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion.39

It is this second aspect of immaterial labour that most readily corre-

sponds with the types of work engaged in by those in the creative indus-
tries. Note that the ‘content’ of the commodity is not the sound of mu-
sic, the image repertoire of the screen, the flash of animation, etcetera.
As with Wittel, the content for Lazzarato is a social relationship: ‘Imma-
terial labor produces first and foremost a “social relationship” (a rela-
tionship of innovation, production, and consumption)’.40
Hardt and Negri expand upon this definition to include affective
forms of labour, as found in domestic and service work that involves the
care of others. Importantly, the concept of immaterial labour is not to
be confused as labour that somehow has eclipsed its material dimen-
sion. Hardt and Negri note that affective labour, for instance, ‘requires
(virtual or actual) human contact, labor in the bodily mode’.41 However,
‘the affects it produces are nonetheless immaterial. What affective labor
produces are social networks, forms of community, biopower’.42 I have
no idea how such products are immaterial. Moreover, such an under-
standing of affect obviates an inquiry into the more nuanced concept of
affect as found in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as Massumi.
For these thinkers, affect consists of the sensing of sensation. A material

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dimension is apparent here in so far as the sensing of sensation assumes

that a process of corporeal transformation and de-subjectification is
under way. Thus the ‘product’ of immaterial labour in its affective mode
is precisely this transformation, which is also a change in materiality
and the relationship between various actants.
Lazzarato, Hardt and Negri are concerned, then, with defining imma-
terial labour in terms of the product of labour that is immaterial (knowl-
edge, communication, affect-care, etcetera) as distinct from its actual
undertaking.43 It is true that one does not sell care as a material product,
but rather the image or sound of care. One may also sell the memory of
care, but this operation depends upon a medium which still, nonethe-
less, communicates such memories in the form of an image or sound.
Memory is thus predicated on what could be termed a sonic image.
And such constellations, as we know, saturate the marketplace. Or as
Lefebvre once observed, ‘We are surrounded by emptiness, but it is an
emptiness filled with signs’.44 All sonic image forms are encoded by
communications media, and as such they possess a material dimension.
Palpable as an image or sound may be, care, in its commercial form, is
not something that one holds or drives down the street, but a service
one acquires. Yet the immaterial labour that produces the service of
care holds a material dimension. The material dimension of this opera-
tion of exchange value tells us something of great significance vis-à-vis
the commodity object. What, in fact, is occurring in this relation of ex-
change is nothing less than the de-ontologization and deterritorializa-
tion of the commodity object itself. I am speaking here of a question of
boundaries and a question of time; in short, a question of the limits of
capital. It is a category mistake to understand the commodity object as
a ‘thing in itself’. When the commodity object is situated, as it is, within
a system of social relations, the extent to which it becomes intelligible
is only possible in terms of a social relation. That is, the commodity
object is simultaneously constituted by and conditions the possibility
of the contingencies of a social system. It is impossible, then, for the
commodity object to be extricated from this system. To do so is to speak
of a utopia, the utopia of post-capitalism. Were such a world to actual-
ize, it would not feature a role for the commodity object.
Because the concept of immaterial labour is open to various abuses,
misunderstandings (my own included), and complex intellectual filia-

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tions, I suggest that it be dropped within critical Internet, cultural and

information theory in favour of a concept of disorganized labour. Cre-
ative and informational modes of labour as they currently exist are bet-
ter understood as disorganized; by conceiving work in this manner, the
political dimension of labour is retained in so far as opposition and rev-
olution have in modern times required workers to either self-organize
or form a compact alliance with intellectuals, who have formed the
symbolic spearhead of political change. Granted, our times consist of
post-Fordist modes of production, exchange and accumulation integrat-
ed with informational modes of connection, all of which have seen the
steady erosion of organized labour. Even so, there persists an ineradica-
ble class dimension to labour and the uneven distribution of capital.
From these conditions, the reorganization of labour is possible. And
while the failures of revolution are well documented and acutely expe-
rienced by many, and the problems of political and symbolic represen-
tation clearly theorized in the work of Baudrillard, Spivak, Balibar,
Mouffe and others, there remains the need – perhaps greater than ever
before – to retain a sense of the importance, a sense of the urgency, for
labour to have the means and the potential to organize itself.
The distinction between conceiving labour as immaterial or disor-
ganized has implications not only at the level of political theory. While
Hardt and Negri’s book Empire has without question captured a latent
structure of feeling simmering within many leftist movements, it is
now time to extend that political momentum in ways that go beyond
the partisan interests of ‘the multitude’ and engage workers at the local
level of their everyday institutional circumstances. The condition of dis-
organized labour corresponds, of course, with the disorganized technics
of capitalism, as discussed by Lash and Urry.45 However, these two
arrangements are not equivalent. The disorganized technics of capital –
flexible accumulation, transnational labour mobility, risk societies,
etcetera – are simply another mode by which capitalism is managed in
a ‘postnational’, globalized setting. Disorganized labour, on the other
hand, is symptomatic of the demise of union power, the deinstitutional-
ization of labour, and the consolidation of individualization within a
neoliberal paradigm.
Lash and Urry suppose that the different temporal modes by which
organizations and technologies operate, conditions the possibility of

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disorganized capitalism. They associate a decline in national institu-

tions and their capacity to regulate flows of subjects and objects within
a national frame with the end of organized capitalism. While they seek
to go beyond a dualistic mode of thinking, they in fact reproduce such a
mode: ‘Disorganized capitalism disorganizes everything’.46 As rhetori-
cally appealing as this slogan may be, such a blanket approach to the
complexity of contemporary capitalism precludes the possibility of
labour organizing itself in multi-temporal ways through various media
of communication in conjunction with the cultural peculiarities of so-
cio-institutional locations and networks. Crucially, the exploitation of
creative labour continues as what the autonomists have called ‘a theft
of time’. The possession of time by any kind of worker is the condition
of possibility for the organization of labour.
The failure of Negri, Lazzarato and others who gather around the
concept of immaterial labour is, quite remarkably given their respective
intensely political life experiences, a failure to understand the nature of
‘the political’. The concept of immaterial labour, in its refusal to locate
itself in specific discourse networks, communications media and mate-
rial situations, refuses also to address the antagonistic underpinnings of
social relations. As Marx so clearly understood, capital is first and fore-
most a social relation (this, the autonomists know well). This remains
just as true today for those engaged in creative, intellectual and service
industries – tiers of labour that, in their state of disorganization, of
course hold intimate connections with other sectors of work no matter
how abstracted they may be from one another in geographical, class,
cultural, economic and communicative terms.
There is a remarkable correspondence between Hardt and Negri and
other ‘radical’ Italians on immaterial labour and the disorganized multi-
tude, and the kinds of views put forward by many proponents of the
creative industries such as Florida, Caves, Leadbeater, Brooks, Howkins,
the National Research Council of the National Academies (usa) and
their Australian counterparts. If there is a perception that Hardt and
Negri offer a structure of feeling for the renewal of left politics and
activism and that creative industries are, broadly speaking, an extension
of Third Way ideology and neoliberalism with a softer face, then the
similarities between these two camps are in some respects greater than
their differences. The variegated system of disorganized labour within

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creative industries and informational economies is homologous,

I would suggest, with Hardt and Negri’s multitude; organized labour is
seen by Hardt and Negri as an obsolete, politically limited vestige of a
socialism constituted by industrial capitalism.47 The promotion by the
creative industries of ‘individual creativity and skill’ at the expense of
the social relations that make both individual and collective activities
possible corresponds at a discursive level with neoliberalism’s ‘cus-
tomization’ and atomization of the subject, or what Brian Holmes co-
gently diagnoses as ‘the flexible personality’.48 Furthermore, in isolating
the networked individual as the unit of creative production there is an
implicit hostility within the creative industries to the concept of organ-
ized labour, the practice of which has historically placed demands on
capitalists for fairer and more equitable working conditions. Creative
industries are far from alone here. As Justin Clemens argues, the affir-
mation of bricolage, mobility, and heterogeneous subcultural styles so
typical within many Cultural Studies ‘accounts unfold on the basis of a
prior covert identification of organization with authority, and authority
with oppression’.49 Surely it is time to get over such hostility toward the
dark phantasm of organization?
Unions today not only have increasingly limited purchase on gov-
ernments with neoliberal dispositions, they also have limited appeal for
younger workers whose political ideologies have emerged within a
neoliberal paradigm and whose social experiences are not, for the most
part, formed within the institutional cultures offered by union move-
ments, as has been the case for older generations. Just as Hardt and
Negri dismiss 1980s and ’90s postmodernism for its collusion with cor-
porate culture (and there is much merit in this thesis, as documented
more succinctly by Thomas Frank), so too their own multitude is en-
twined within the arguably more accentuated managerialism of the
creative industries, where labour continues its transformation into sur-
plus value, only this time in the form of intellectual property – a socio-
juridical form that lends itself more readily to the technical system of
electronic stock markets and financial speculation than it does to a
radical politics. Though here, of course, one finds the counterforms of
p2p file-sharing, tactical media and open source movements; digital
piracy of software, music and new release cinema; clones of drug, tech-
nical and gm food patents, etcetera. The extent to which these counter-

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practices can be called a politics in the sense of an organized interven-

tion into hegemonic regimes is, however, questionable and needs to be
assessed on a case by case basis. Is digital piracy, for example, a political
act or just a business strategy by less powerful economic actors in their
efforts to circumvent transnational corporate monopolies and the legal
regimes and trade agreements that advance corporate interests?

Conclusion
At the start of this chapter I drew a distinction between a processual
media empirics and the new media empirics. The former is concerned
with analysing and being a part of the movements and modulations be-
tween the conditions of possibility and that which has emerged as an
object, code or meaning within the grid of the present. The latter is pri-
marily interested in delimiting the field of movement, and stabilizing
the object of study as an end in itself. Processual media theory does not
dispense with the empirical, rather it is superempirical. But its mode of
empiricism does not conform to the logic of immanence as expounded
by Lash in his book Critique of Information: ‘The global information socie-
ty has an immanentist culture, fully a one and flat world culture. As
such, its regime of culture is radically empiricist’.50 The world Lash de-
scribes is not one that contains the wonders, difficulties and complexi-
ties of life. Nor for that matter is the world Hardt and Negri call Empire:
‘In this new historical formation it is thus no longer possible to identify
a sign, a subject, a value, or a practice that is “outside”’.51 Today’s media-
information cultures – the situation of creative labour – are indeed
characterized by reflexive non-linear systems; they do not, however,
eschew their constitutive outsides.
In his essay on Blanchot, Foucault notes that ‘Any reflexive discourse
runs the risk of leading the experience of the outside back to the dimen-
sion of interiority; reflection tends irresistibly to repatriate it to the side
of consciousness and to develop it into a description of living that de-
picts the “outside” as the experience of the body, space, the limits of the
will, and ineffaceable presence of the other’.52 Further: ‘It risks setting
down ready-made meanings that stitch the old fabric of interiority back
together in the form of an imagined outside’. Such a mode of reflexivity
is one that Lash and Beck attribute to ‘first modernity’. It is a mode of
reflexivity that is anterior to a processual understanding of communica-

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tion, where transformation, agonism and change are integral to the

operation of reflexivity.
Processual reflexivity is the operative mode peculiar to quasi-sub-
jects and quasi-objects situated in social-technical arrangements and
conditioned by the accumulation of knowledge, experience and social-
political and economic forces. It is a reflexive mode that ‘must not be
directed toward any inner confirmation – not toward a kind of central,
unshakable [sic] certitude – but toward an outer bound where it must
continually contest itself’.53 The non-discursive dimensions of creative
labour operate as the constitutive outside of the creative industries;
the invisible plurality of creativity cannot be generated in order to be
exploited in the form of ip, yet the lives in which creativity subsists
certainly can be exploited. For this reason, the antagonism intrinsic to
‘the political’ will persist as a social-technical potential of labour-power.
The trick is to work out ways in which the antagonisms underpinning
creative labour within a system of intellectual property regimes might
be translated otherwise.
So how, we might ask, can a para-radical, all-too-social politics be
created as organized labour within informational media ecologies?
Zizek is only partly right when he declares with typical impudent brio
that ‘the key Leninist lesson today is that politics without the organiza-
tional form of the party is politics without politics’.54 The time for par-
ties is over! Go to your next creative industries bonding session if you
want to play with cherry-flavoured vodka. It is now time for modest,
pragmatic engagements with localized networked politics. This
amounts to finding a form or modality of political organization that
appeals to those working within the creative industries. In doing so,
one is also attending to the question of how we think the relationship
between communications media and the new institutional possibilities
they enable.
Given the reluctance by unions to organize their constituencies
within the logic of what Régis Debray terms ‘mediology’,55 and what we
translated in the fibreculture reader as the mediation of politics within
a digital present,56 it is unlikely that the organizational habitus of union
culture will provide the institutional framework for creative labour.
Or as Danny Butt notes in his response to an earlier draft of this chapter,
‘The union that should represent the interests of my colleagues remains

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monist, masculinist, and mired in a basic inability to simply listen and

understand the motivations and experiences of its constituency’.57 This
is but one instantiation of the antagonism of ‘the political’ as it figures
in the complex of relations between the institution of unions and the
informational-material situation of creative labour. Tensions of this or-
der do not, however, preclude the possibility of translating some of the
fundamental values peculiar to union culture (collective bargaining,
equality and democracy, safe and healthy working conditions, etcetera)
into the political form of organized networks: a conceptual technics in
which networks rather than the organization or institution per se are
the condition of possibility for labour articulated within new media ter-
rains.58 Ultimately the challenge of political organization is a challenge
for all critical creative workers as they subsist in the form of networks,
not the party.

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Part iii
5 Processual Media Theory

Sense-perception happens without our awareness: whatever we

become conscious of is a perception that has already been
processed.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, 2003.

‘Process as such’, writes Michel Serres, ‘remains to be conceived . . .’.1

Furthermore, if we take Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari at their word
(something they warn us not to do!), then all concepts are connected to
problems.2 The relationship between concepts and their problems con-
stitutes a situation. For the purpose of this chapter, the formation of in-
telligibility is a system consisting of concepts, problems and situations.
Process is something ongoing in nature, an emergent quality whose
expression is shaped by the contingencies and field of forces of any par-
ticular situation. In this respect, process can never be conceived in itself.
Given this immediate predicament, this chapter investigates the possi-
bility of at once conceiving a processual theory for media studies while
locating the emergent concept of process alongside a series of problems.
Or rather, the concept of process emerges through the encounter with a
series of problems, which in turn can be understood as situations of pos-
sibility or ‘a continuum of variation’.3 The central problems addressed
in this chapter include those of aesthetics, new media empirics, time
and movement. Of course this series of problems, this continuum of
variation, in no way outlines the totality of the field of new media
studies.4 That would be absurd, or just plain stupid. These problems
emerge as instances of encounter, as framing devices, in thinking the
concept of process.
The term aesthetics (aesthesis) is used in this chapter to speak of the
organization and management of sensation and perception. My interest
is in the way sensory affect and an aesthetic regime, as distinct from rep-
resentation (mimesis), can be discussed in relation to new communica-
tions media. The aesthetic dimension of new media resides in the
processes – the ways of doing, the recombination of relations, the figur-
al dismantling of action – that constitute the abstraction of the social.
Herein lies the unconscious code of new media empirics. That is to say,

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new media empirics can become something other than what it predom-
inantly is at the current conjuncture. It is the potential for a superem-
pirics of new media that this chapter seeks to translate through the con-
cept of process. A super- or renewed empiricism is coextensive with the
processual as a diagramming of different layers and registers of rela-
tions and regimes of value that constitute the possibility of the event
where ‘affect [is] expressed as pure potentiality’.5 Following Massumi, a
Deleuzian superempiricism comprises a mode of encounter that articu-
lates the field of forces, the sensing of sensation, which traverses the
movement between that which has emerged as an object, code, or
meaning and their conditions of possibility.6 It is by paying attention
to these very local instances, which are of course bound up and tangled
with larger structural forces, that the political and ethical work of a
renewed empiricism might proceed.
A processual aesthetics of media culture enables things not usually
associated with each other to be brought together into a system of rela-
tions. The combination of art, commerce and the routine practice of
stock market day trading constitutes such a system, as I will go on to
discuss. Far too frequently the representation, understanding or view of
art practice divorces the artwork or artist from the actually existing eco-
nomic forces that shape and affect art practice. With such oversights,
one could be excused for thinking the modernist project was well and
truly intact. Michael Goldberg’s installation catchingafallingknife.com in-
stantiates the ways in which aesthetic forces are not simply under-
pinned by economic relations; aesthetics, as the sensing of sensation,
also plays an important substantive role in shaping economic out-
comes. There is a vital lesson at work here, namely that art does indeed
have effects that go beyond the typically self-aggrandizing ghetto of
spot-lit obscurity and cyclical fashions of the culture industries. Art is
part of a process of ‘difference which makes a difference’, as the anthropolo-
gist Gregory Bateson neatly put it.7
A processual media theory describes situations as they are constitut-
ed within and across spatio-temporal networks of relations, of which
the communications medium is but one part, or actor. As with any ap-
proach, processual media theory itself is implicated in the systems of re-
lations it describes; as such, it too operates in a reflexive mode that con-
tributes to change within the system. Aesthetic production is defined

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by transformative iterations, rather than supposedly discrete objects in

commodity form. Processual aesthetics is related to the notion of the
sublime, which is ‘witness to indeterminacy’.8 The media sublime un-
ravels the security presupposed by the political economy of empirical
research on new media.
Political economy has a tendency to treat the media as a set of objects
and, accordingly, objectivizes media technologies or media content as
‘products’, such as advertisements. Political economy and functionalist
sociology of the media cannot understand the locus of social-technical
transformations that are relational and have sensory effects whose oper-
ation is not determined by a positivist empirics of the media as seen, for
example, in traditional media impacts/effects analysis, content analysis
and ‘uses and gratifications’ functionalist research.9 Then there is the
political economy of new media empirics. That is, the political, econom-
ic and institutional conditions which shape neo-empirics as the emer-
gent paradigm in the field of new media studies.10 While new media
empirics is useful for cataloguing observable trends and phenomena,
this paradigm is not so adept at reflecting upon the dominant interests
and questions of power that condition its own legitimacy.11
The political dimension of aesthetics is manifest in the power rela-
tions that attend processual systems. In order to undertake an analysis
of the social-technical assemblages that constitute the processual, atten-
tion would need to be paid to the institutional settings of new media
and their uses, be they in the office, at home, or in networked gaming
arcades, for example, and the conditions of cultural production. A
processual aesthetics of the socio-technics of these arrangements attests
to the politics of post-representation. The articulation of various ele-
ments that constitute a network can be thought of in terms of duration
(a mode of temporality that is antithetical to instrumental time), which
might also be termed the processual aesthetics of new media. So, a
processual aesthetics of new media is related to and constituted within
the time and space of the media event.12 Networked gaming, online
opinion polling, web petitions and blogs are all instances of new media
that incorporate an aesthetic regime defined by non-linearity, interac-
tivity and real-time processing that constitutes everyday media events.
A processual media theory can enhance existing approaches within
the field of new media studies, registering the movement between that

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which has emerged as an empirical object, meaning or code, and the

various conditions of possibility. Processual media theory inquires into
that which is otherwise rendered as invisible, yet is fundamental to the
world as we sense it. Thus, processual media theory could be considered
as a task engaged in the process of translation.13 To this end, this chap-
ter addresses the problematic of a renewed empirical mode that has
come to dominate intellectual practice within media studies; indeed
this predominant mode extends beyond any single discipline and pre-
vails across the humanities and technosciences. As we saw in the previ-
ous chapter, new media empirics has found itself enlisted in the mis-
sion of neoliberalism, which subordinates the practice of life to the de-
mands of a market economy. Building on the argument set out in chap-
ter 4, this chapter develops a processual model of media theory as an al-
ternative to, and mode of critique of, empirical research. Further, this
chapter contends that a processual model of communications is useful
in addressing the politics of information societies. As Deleuze has writ-
ten, ‘Concepts, with their zones of presence, should intervene to resolve
local situations’.14 This chapter begins its correspondence between con-
cepts and problems with a discussion of ‘new media empirics’.

New Media Empirics

Over the past few years, one is increasingly able to detect the emer-
gence of empirical approaches to the study of new media as the current
dominant paradigm. An empirics of new media describes the various
forms, objects, experiences and artworks that constitute new media.
The empiricist desire to fix all that is virtual into concrete is coextensive
with a certain weariness, boredom or distrust of the excesses of ‘post-
modern theory’ that came to characterize much work going on in media
and cultural studies and contemporary art during the 1980s and ’90s.
These fields all share a desire to ground their objects of study, to re-
trieve them from the ravages of ‘speculative theory’, and in so doing,
perhaps begin a process of reconstructing or securing disciplinary iden-
tities. Arguably, all of this coincides with the perceived displacement of
national and local communities wrought by communications media
such as satellite tv, the Internet and the mobile phone. Very real dis-
placement across social scales accompanies the structural transforma-
tions of national and regional economies in a post-Soviet era in which

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populations have become increasingly mobile at transnational levels as

professional or unskilled labour, as refugees, or as tourists.
It is the task of empirical studies to describe and analyse these vari-
ous transformations, yet to delimit such work to the scholastic mode of
production is to overlook the ways in which such research corroborates
the interests of capital which, in the corporatization of universities,
finds the current empirical paradigm as the new frontier of instrumen-
tal reason. Much research on the Internet is quantitative and commer-
cially driven, measuring, for example, the number of hits and counting
users on web pages. Researchers, or information workers, in many in-
stances are providing data analysis that has commercial applications in
ascertaining consumer habits and, in the case of new media studies,
there is an attempt to foreclose the myriad ways in which users engage
with media forms and content. It’s all quite desperate. And it’s all relat-
ed to a quest to capture markets.
A non-reflexive and non-reflective new media empirics assumes that
the various uses of new media forms, or the practices constituted by me-
dia forms, define the horizon of intelligibility of new media. Different
uses, different meanings. But is that all there is to it? Are the arrange-
ments or networks of new media confined to their uses, whether it’s by
human or non-human actors? And at what point does one say the field
of actors has been identified? When does the list of actors end? Upon
what plane of abstraction does use manifest? Are there registers of use
that are overlooked because the multidimensional planes of abstraction
are not identified? These are all questions which begin to problematize
the security, even arrogance, presupposed by a method which seeks to
quantify the semiotics of new media in terms of the uses made of partic-
ular new communications media.
Empirical research typically proceeds by securing what is otherwise
a fluid, contingent and partially unstable process constituting a system
of interrelations. While there are significant distinctions between the
two, empirical research across a range of disciplines is often based on
principles found in positivist empiricism. Louis Althusser locates the
problem of empiricism as a method in terms of its assumption of hav-
ing captured the essence of an object through the process of abstraction.
As he wrote over thirty years ago in Reading Capital: ‘Empiricist abstrac-
tion, which abstracts from the given real object its essence, is a real ab-

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straction, leaving the subject in possession of the real essence’.15 In order

to extract the real essence from the object, empiricism undertakes an
operation that eliminates the object’s constitutive outside. This proce-
dure serves as an epistemological validation of empiricism, since ‘To
know is to abstract from the real object its essence, the possession of
which by the subject is then called knowledge’.16 Hence a relationship
based on presence-absence is produced between that which is revealed
as real (the objects of knowledge) and the procedural mode that has en-
abled this operation (the form of knowledge and its structural forces).
For Althusser, empiricist knowledge is part of a larger hegemonic epis-
teme or ‘apparatus of thought’ that grants primacy to vision, seeking to
make visible the invisible.17 The fundamental error of such abstraction
is that it fails to reflect critically upon the conditions of possibility for
such a procedure.
As a methodological practice, empiricism is captured by a delirium
in which there is an assumption that the essence of the object can be
revealed. Due to an incapacity to reflexively engage with the field of
forces that condition its methodology, empiricism eliminates the
processual dimension that underpins the emergence of the supposed
essence of the object, revealed as a form whose meaning is stable. In
contrast to empiricism, Marx and Engels write in The German Ideology
that ‘Empirical observation must in each instance bring out empirical-
ly, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of
the social and political structure with production’.18 And: ‘As soon as
this active life-process is described, history ceases to be a collection of
dead facts, as it is with the empiricists (themselves still abstract), or an
imagined activity of imagined subjects, as with the idealists’.19 As a
result of these sorts of oversights, empiricism offers nothing by way of
political critique. Indeed, to do so would endanger the very legitimacy
of empiricism as a method. Further, as David Holmes has noted, ‘The
more it [empiricism] establishes the visibility of what it sees, the more it
establishes knowledge, the better able it is to guarantee itself’.20 Since
the social relations of production that condition the space and time of
‘the political’ are part of the constitutive outside that the empiricist
problematic excludes, empiricism attributes, according to Althusser, an
‘inessential’ value to social-political and historical conditions of forma-
tion.21

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While Althusser is one of the principal theorists of ideology critique

responsible for thumping positivist variants of empiricism, as outlined
above, I would suggest that Althusser’s work holds a useful enough
foundation, actually, for empirical – as distinct from empiricist – re-
search. Ideology, for Althusser, is associated with the imaginary. This
image repertoire, most importantly, is reproduced in material practices
located in institutional settings, from which subject formation occurs
(through, admittedly, the flawed notion of interpellation). In order to
begin talking about the processes of ideology and its attendant power
relations, one needs to start identifying, in an empirical manner of the
kind argued by Marx and Engels, the very local practices within which
ideology is reproduced.
In the case of new media empirics, which reproduces the method-
ological procedure of empiricism, a reflexive encounter with its tech-
niques of operation would begin to take into account the plurality of
forces, including those of institutional interests, which condition the
formation of a practice, code or meaning. In doing so, the multidimen-
sional pluralism that functions as empiricism’s constitutive outside
would come to bear. Moreover, the politics that attends such an opera-
tion could be situated in an ‘agonistic’ framework in which pluralistic
discourses, practices, forces and interests procure a legitimacy that is
otherwise denigrated by empiricism’s claim to have abstracted the
essence of the object from the real.
The shift in media studies and other disciplines to a non-reflective
and non-reflexive empirical mode is perhaps best accounted for by pay-
ing attention to the shift that has occurred in the conditions of produc-
tion associated with intellectual labour within a neoliberal paradigm.
Within this mode is a pressure for intellectual practices to become
accountable. This pressure is not motivated by ethical considerations,
which include the delivery of knowledge and engagement with teach-
ing and research in ways that are responsive both to their own discipli-
nary circumstances and to those who are subjects within a particular in-
stitution and its disciplinary formations. Rather, there is a managerialist
demand for the products of intellectual labour – knowledge coded as
intellectual property, which makes possible the commodity object – to
be accountable to the logic of exchange value and market mechanisms.

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The neoliberal imaginary seeks to subject all socio-cultural practices

to the laws of the market, which are one manifestation, albeit limited,
of the logic of capital. As such, a technique of verification is required,
and the humanities have turned to the sciences for such a tool. This is
hardly surprising, since the sciences have long held a relationship with
industry, which sees the output of labour within the sciences as holding
commercial and industrial application. A perception dominates within
the managerial culture of academe that assumes vulgar empirics to be
the technique that best enables intellectual labour to be measured,
quantified and reported in terms of stasis or stability.
The key problem of an empirics of new media aesthetics resides in its
failure, in a number of instances, to understand that the aesthetics of
artworks, software applications and technologies are conditioned by so-
cial relations as well as the theoretical paradigms through which analy-
sis proceeds. Technology, as understood by Raymond Williams, is found
in the processual dimension of articulation, where the media is but one
contingent element that undergoes transformation upon every re-artic-
ulation.22 This presents a challenge to the empirical turn in Net studies,
which seeks in vain to pin down a terrain that is made historically re-
dundant prior to its emergence. By way of an alternative, Lash proposes
that ‘Empirical meaning is neither logical (as in classification) nor onto-
logical, but everyday and contingent’.23 Empirical approaches to the
Net, if nothing else, need to work in a reflexive mode that is constantly
aware of the conditions attached to funded research, to critique them, to
describe the institutional cultures that shape the emergent third para-
digm of Net studies, and to see the seemingly secure ground of any em-
pirical moment as something which is always interpenetrating with
something else.

Processual Aesthetics as Radical Empiricism

With the invention of the telegraph came the genre, form or style of
telegraphic writing, of news wires. Think of Ernest Hemingway, with
his telegraphic, machine-gun writing style – a mode of writing within
and through media of communication. Moreover, a zone of indistinc-
tion between the human and non-human emerges with the advent of
new communications media. As Friedrich Kittler suggestively notes of
Nietzsche upon his use in 1882 of a Malling Hansen typewriter: ‘Our

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writing tool not only works on our thoughts, it “is a thing like me”’.24
With failing eyesight, the ‘mechanized philosopher’ undergoes a trans-
formation of expression: Nietzsche ‘changed from arguments to apho-
risms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style’.25
The Malling Hansen model initiates a kinaesthetics based on touch,
since its ‘semi-circular arrangement of the keys itself prevented a view
of the paper’.26 The shift from visual control and linearity associated
with the pen and paper to the blind activity of typing constitutes a femi-
nization of philosophy, argues Kittler.27 The primacy of the classical
author corresponds with a closed system predicated on social-technical
distinctions associated with the ‘phallogocentrism of classical slate pen-
cils’ and ‘the sexually closed feedback loop’ of the Gutenberg Galaxy.28
The machinic philosopher, by contrast, is part of a combinatory system
that brings together philosopher, typewriter, a ‘delicacy’ of touch, and
women, who dominated the ranks of secretaries in printing houses in
the late nineteenth century. Piano fingers turn out to be good typing
fingers.
With the Internet, we have seen hypertext, listservs, net.art, and so
forth. With the mobile phone, short-text messaging (sms) has emerged
as one the most popular social-technical forms of communication.
These could all be talked about in terms of media aesthetics. However,
I think it is more interesting for an aesthetics of new media to consider
the ways in which social and cultural formations not immediately at-
tributable to the media with which they are contemporary might also
be included in the pantheon of media aesthetics. Such articulations
might constitute the unthought of media aesthetics: social and cultural
forms that are not determined by media technologies, but are potential-
ities that coincide with or are parallel to contemporaneous communica-
tions media.
A processual aesthetics of new media goes beyond what is simply
seen or represented on the screen. It seeks to identify how online prac-
tices are always conditioned by and articulated with seemingly invisi-
ble forces, institutional desires and regimes of practice. Furthermore, a
processual aesthetics recognizes the material and embodied dimensions
of Net cultures. When you engage with a virtual or online environment,
are you simply doing the same thing as you would in a non-virtual envi-
ronment, where you might be looking at objects, communicating, using

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your senses – vision, sound, etcetera? In other words, if the chief argu-
ment of the new media empirics lies in the idea that we simply ought to
pay close attention to what people ‘do’ on the Net and ignore any
grander claims about virtual technologies, is this adequate? Is there
anything in this ‘do-ing’ which deserves greater analysis?
Do virtual environments simply extend our senses and our actions
across space and time, or do they reconstitute them differently? There is
a strong argument to be made for the latter. In the same way that visual
culture – especially the cinema – legitimized a certain way of looking at
things through techniques such as standardized camera work and con-
tinuous camera editing, then virtual technologies reorganize and man-
age the senses and our modes of perception in similar ways. As Kafka
once noted: ‘Cinema involves putting the eye into uniform’.
Software design, virtual environments, games, and search engines all
generate and naturalize certain ways of knowing and apprehending the
world. We can find examples of this with database retrieval over linear
narrative, hypertext, 3d movement through space as the means to
knowledge, and editing and selection rather than simple acquisition. So
if empirics can record that we have virtual conversations, look up cer-
tain sites, and so forth, it doesn’t consider the technics of combining visual
and tactile perceptions in certain ways and in certain contexts to allow for
distinct modes of understanding the world. Nor does a new media em-
pirics inquire into the specific techniques by which sensation and per-
ception are managed. This is the task of processual aesthetics.
The repetition of technics of sensation and perception are partially
distinguished by the regimes of value (economic, legal, political and
cultural) which are inscribed upon such ways of doing. A processual
aesthetics of media theory seeks to identify the various methods that
typify empirical research on the Internet, and to follow this up with a
critique of the empirical mode by considering the institutional desires
and regimes of practice that condition the types and methods of re-
search undertaken on new ICTs at the current conjuncture within infor-
mational societies. While recognizing that the Internet does make our
social and cultural transactions more ‘abstract’ – that is, reconstituted
from place-bound relations into the ‘space of flows’29 – this of course
does not mean that everyone uses the Net in the same way, or that the
Net has the same significance for everyone. Instead, an emphasis is

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placed on process, on the organization and management of sensation

and perception, which are understood here as the basis of aesthetics.
The experience of time, space, others and embodiment cannot be en-
compassed by a new media empirics which simply lists and categorizes
what an actor does, overlooking the forces and contexts that allow ac-
tion to occur.
In The Language of New Media, media theorist and artist Lev
Manovich undertakes a media archaeology of post-media or software
theory.30 He focuses on a very particular idea about what constitutes the
materiality of new media, and hence aesthetics. In excavating a history
of the present for new media, Manovich’s work is important in that it
maps out recent design applications, animation practices and composit-
ing techniques, for example, that operate in discrete or historically con-
tinuous modes. However, Manovich’s approach is one that assumes
form as a given, yet forgets the social-political arrangements that media
forms are necessarily embedded in, and which imbue any visual (not to
mention sonic) taxonomy or typology with a code: that is, a language
whose precondition is the possibility for meaning to be produced.
The aesthetic that constitutes a code is only possible through a
process of articulation with modes of practice, of interpenetrative mo-
ments, of duration. In Niklas Luhmann’s terms, a code is integral to the
reproduction of structural difference within a functional system.31 As
Luhmann writes: ‘Codes are distinctions, forms that serve as observa-
tional devices. They are mobile structures that are applied differently
from situation to situation’.32 Structural determination is thus depend-
ent on the code, whose function is to symbolize. Such an operation en-
ables self-organization within a system, as I discuss below. In Gregory
Bateson’s terms, codes are the ‘difference which makes a difference’.
These are all processes that new media empirics eliminates.
The network is not ‘decomposable into constituent points’.33 That is
what a non-reflective and non-reflexive empirics of new media, of infor-
mational economies and network societies in its reified institutional
mode, attempts to do. The network is not a ‘measurable, divisible space’.
Rather, it holds a ‘nondecomposable’ dimension that always exceeds –
or better, subsists within – what in the name of non-reflexive empirics
are predetermined regimes of quantification, which, as Massumi has it,
‘is an emergent quality of movement’.34 This is not to say that things

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never occupy a concrete space. An analytics of space (and time), if it is

to acknowledge the complexity of things, cannot take as its point of de-
parture the state of arrest of things. Instead, attention needs to take a
step back (or perhaps a step sideways, and then back within), and in-
quire into the preconditions of stasis. And this does not mean occupy-
ing a teleological position, which seeks to identify outcomes based on
causes. Or as Massumi puts it, the ‘emphasis is on process before signifi-
cation or coding’.35
That is, there is a multidimensionality to socio-aesthetic experiences.
They are not bound or contained by any particular communications
medium or transport technology. Thus we can say, on precisely these
sorts of grounds, that the ‘virtual’ and the ‘material’ are always intimate-
ly and complexly intertwined. And to overlook this fundamental princi-
ple is to impoverish, among other things, the practice of research on
new media. What Massumi terms a ‘superempirics’ would register
this multidimensionality of socio-aesthetics: a complex of practices
that is constituted within and across pathways, passages and vectors of
mediality.
In formulating a processual model for media theory, this chapter
does not dispense with empirical work. Far from it. A processual media
theory registers the ways in which communications media – any medi-
um of expression – are bound in a system of relations, a singularity of
expression, that consists of a field of forces in which things are defined
or registered as a concrete stable form, which in turn becomes a condi-
tion for transformation and change. Massumi describes this process in
terms of the movement between that which has emerged and the condi-
tions of potentiality or ‘the virtual’, understood in a Deleuzian sense of
radical empiricism.36 Time for new media empirics, which is not to be
confused with radical empiricism, consists of the present, where things
are manifest in concrete form. This kind of presupposition cannot ac-
count for the multiplicity of time immanent to the operation of the vir-
tual and the actual, which Massumi explains in the following way: ‘The
virtual is the future-past of the present: a thing’s destiny and condition
of existence. . . . A thing’s actuality is its duration as a process . . .’.37
Similarly, as Deleuze notes, ‘Movement always relates to a change,
migration to a seasonal variation’.38 Thus a processual media theory
examines the tensions and torques between that which has emerged

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and conditions of possibility; it is an approach that inquires into the

potentiality of motion that underpins the existence and formation of
a system.39 Herein lies the practice of a radical transcendental empiri-
cism. New media studies has yet to express this particular encounter.
If anything, the dominant mode of empirical research unwittingly
defines ‘the axis of escape along which the differential object . . . [slips]
quietly away from its own growing objectivity’.40 With regard to en-
countering the empirical, Massumi notes:

If by ‘empirical’ is meant ‘pertaining to predictable interactions be-

tween isolatable elements, formulatable as deterministic laws’, then
the conditions of emergence of vision are superempirical. They ac-
tively include the constancy of empirical conditions. The superempir-
ical conditions of experience complexly include the empirical in the
mode of responsive accompaniment. As experience takes off, its em-
pirical conditions fall away.41

The superempirical is immanent to the concept of the processual,

which questions the logic of the grid, of categories, of codings and posi-
tions.42 Those things which precede these orders of distinction are in
fact bound together on a continuum of relations as partial zones of in-
distinction. Categories are only ever provisional, and emerge to suit
specific ends, functions, interests, disciplinary regimes and institutional
realities. To this end, the mode of empirical research that predominates
in the humanities and sciences – and in particular current research on
new media – needs to be considered in terms of not what categories say
about their objects, but rather, in terms of what categories say about the
movement between that which has emerged and the conditions of possi-
bility. Herein lie the contingencies of process.
As the sensing of sensation, of the experience of pre-linguistic attrib-
utes, superempiricism corresponds with that other pre-linguistic cate-
gory – the imaginary.43 Within Marxist-Lacanian psychoanalytic theo-
ry, an imaginary construction signals that there can be no essence, but
multiple imaginary terrains that contest, support or ignore one another.
Each imaginary formation is articulated with a series of material pre-
conditions. A genealogy of any imaginary formation would involve ex-
amining the constellation of material forms and practices and symbolic

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dimensions that distinguish one imaginary formation from another.

So, the imaginary does not forego the possibility of the real, but actively
inculcates the real or non-discursive entity as a necessary condition of
its own formation. If there is a fundamental lesson to be gained from
Althusser’s seminal essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’,
it was this: ideology consists of lived relations or social practices organ-
ized in part by a logic of sensibility found in symbolic realms.44 The
imaginary, as such, is constituted by material practices located within
institutional settings. The work of cultural industries, which circulate
images of celebrities in abundance, evinces the relationship between
the imaginary and materiality. The latter, it must be noted, is not to be
confused with ‘the real’, whose surplus resists integration into the sym-
bolic order.45
Unlike the Classical Marxist view of the superstructure as a reflec-
tion of the economic base/mode of production, Althusser’s advance on
Marxist theory was to explain how the ISAs displayed a ‘relative autono-
my’ from the determining influences of the economic base, except ‘in
the last instance’. Many critics over the years have taken the opportuni-
ty to attribute this seeming contradiction and regression to a vulgar
Marxian orthodoxy as evidence of the failure of a Althusser’s model of
ideology. Further, the overdetermining role of the economic base on the
realm of ideology suggests a point of finitude whereby a distinction of
mutual exclusion or incommensurability exists between the realm of
the imaginary and that of the real. However, as John Frow has argued:

There is no ‘determination in the last instance by the economic’ be-

cause the last instance never comes. Rather, determination is exer-
cised by ‘permutations, displacements and condensations’, and this
means that the social formation is characterized by the uneven and
nonteleological play of its elements, since the invariant structure of
the complex whole exists only through discrete variations for which
it is a precondition. This is not a pluralism, but it allows an under-
standing of the effect of a plurality of determinations within a struc-
ture where one instance is dominant as a necessary condition of
complexity.46

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One key relationship of determining forces, then, is found in the rela-

tionship between the imaginary and the real. Indeed, the imaginary is
intricately linked with and plays an active role in both constructing and
being constructed by the real. In other words, while the imaginary may
appear to be violated by the presence of the real, this does not mean the
real resides irrevocably in a space of alterity, impossible to locate within
either the imaginary or the symbolic order. For Zizek’s Marxian reading
of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, ‘the real’ is inscribed within spectral
dimensions. As Zizek argues, the ‘resistant kernel’ of ‘the real’ is always
‘present within the symbolic process itself’,47 often in the form of some
antagonism that is played out in the cultural domain. In this respect
there is a materiality that attends the interplay between the real, the
imaginary and the symbolic.
A superempiricism that registers the interplay of forces in the consti-
tution of the event can be found in much of media theorist McKenzie
Wark’s work on ‘weird global media events’: those media imaginaries
that implode, or better, exceed, the logic of discourse, the symbolic or-
der of things, and constitute the event as that which escapes, momen-
tarily, the restrictive confines, conventions and representative struc-
tures of news narratives.48 Such events – the September 11 terrorist at-
tacks on New York City being the most obvious recent example – con-
sist of signs, certainly, but they perhaps are better understood as ‘a-signi-
fying’ semiotic systems.49 Such systems involve what Guattari calls an
‘aesthetic processual paradigm’, ‘autopoietic machines’, and ‘processual
assemblages’ in which expression is ‘extra-linguistic’ and semiotic sub-
stance is ‘relatively untranslatable’.50 That is, such media events are
irreducible to a semiotic encoding/decoding model, as seen in the early
work of Stuart Hall and adopted by many within cultural studies. While
the encoding/decoding model of ideology played a key role in opening
up new questions pertaining to the cultural and political dimensions of
meaning that were not being addressed by uses-and-gratifications and
effects schools of empirical research in mass communications, the mod-
el remains very much one concerned with structuralist understandings
of the sign, representation and language.51
By contrast, a-signifying semiotics only partially relies on semiolo-
gies of signification as a substrate in as much as the prior semiotic order
of content/form (for instance the redundancy of news narratives) is radi-

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cally torn apart (deterritorialized) and rendered anew as a different con-

figuration.52 The constitutive operation of a-signifying semiotics is a
process of ‘escaping coding and redundancy’.53 In such cases, empiri-
cism, maybe at its best, can diagram the transversal coordinates beyond
the space and time of the relatively contained instance of news instal-
ments. This includes the externality of relations, namely percepts, con-
cepts, affects and their habits.54 One of Wark’s techniques for register-
ing this interrelationship between the mediatized event and its move-
ment within the event of the social-technical assemblage or arrange-
ment is to incorporate the everyday into, and as part of, the singularity
of the event.55 The key point, as noted by Gary Genosko, is that ‘semi-
otic-machinic or sign-matter fluxes are unmediated by representa-
tion’.56 Experience, on the other hand, is mediated or governed by prop-
erties, forces, rules, habits and relations that constitute the event. To
this extent, a translation has occurred. Most basically, I see a renewed
empiricism or superempiricism as coextensive with the processual,
where a diagramming of different layers and registers of relations and
regimes of value constitute the possibility of the event in which, as
Deleuze puts it, ‘affect [is] expressed as pure potentiality’. I will address
this dimension of affect after I locate the emergence of processuality as
a concept within cybernetics theory.

Feedback Loops and Dissipative Structures

[C]ybernetics, the theory of self-guidance and feedback loops, is a the-

ory of the Second World War.
Kittler57

A processual media theory can be related back to cybernetics and sys-

tems theory and early models of communication developed by mathe-
matician and electrical engineer Claude Shannon in the 1940s. Howev-
er, there is no single originary point of development of cybernetics. As
Gregory Bateson notes, ‘The ideas were developed in many places: in
Vienna by Bertalanffy, in Harvard by Wiener, in Princeton by von
Neumann, in Bell Telephone labs by Shannon, in Cambridge by Craik
and so on’.58 Shannon’s model is often referred to as the transmission
model, or sender-message-receiver model. It is a process model of

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communication, and for the most part it rightly deserves its place with-
in an introduction to communications programme since it enables a
historical trajectory of communications to be established.
However, it quickly becomes clear that this model holds consider-
able problems because it advances a linear model of communication
flows, from sender to receiver. And this of course just isn’t the way com-
munication proceeds – there’s always a bunch of noise out there that is
going to interfere with the message, both in material and immaterial
ways, and in terms of audiences simply doing different things with mes-
sages and technologies than the inventors or producers might have in-
tended. The polyvocal, multilayered character of communication, cul-
ture and the production of meaning was indeed one of the key tasks
Hall’s encoding/decoding model set out to establish in response to the
assumption of transparent, unilinear communication flows by tradi-
tional empirical, positivistic research in mass communications.59 As
Katherine Hayles puts it, ‘Claude Shannon defined information as a
probability function with no dimensions, no materiality, and no neces-
sary connection with meaning’.60 Such a model has limited uses in cal-
culating choice, probability, behavioural patterns and risk – and hence
holds an appeal for determining likely economic outcomes, as the
young Rupert Murdoch was to discover in his encounter with games
theory61 – but it flounders when conditions are not stable but contin-
gent, variable, and embedded in social-technical and biological forms.
The point to take from this process model is that it later developed to
acknowledge factors of noise or entropy (disorder and deterioration),
once in the hands of anthropologists such as Gregory Bateson. Central
to second-order cybernetic theory is the problem of change and rela-
tionships. As Bateson notes of self-referential relationships, ‘Cybernetics
is, at any rate, a contribution to change – not simply a change in atti-
tude, but even a change in the understanding of what an attitude is’.62
As distinct from understanding information as a homeostatic thing in
itself, Bateson, by Paul Virilio’s account, ‘who was one of the first to
think of information as a general process, added that “Information is
a difference that makes a difference”’.63
Second-order cybernetics shifted from a closed system to an open
system of communication. Or, more correctly, it shifted from a linear
system to one that took feedback loops into account. This becomes

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interesting for a model of processual media and cultural theory, which

is interested in mutually determining relationships between that which
has emerged and the conditions of possibility. The notion of feedback
loops is homologous with the concept of ‘organizational closure’ in
second-order cybernetics, as found in the work on neurophysiology and
biological systems by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, for
example.64 The central feature of Maturana and Varela’s autopoietic
systems consists of the organization of organization. Difference inter-
mingles with the operations of a system in order to maintain a dynamic
equilibrium.
Organizational closure acknowledges the role of the observer in the
functioning of a system, and hence introduces the concept of reflexivity
where the observer constitutes a node within the scene or operation of
observation. In this respect, second-order cybernetics shares something
with post-structuralist critiques of the subject: both are concerned with
questioning the primacy of the individual and the autonomy of the sub-
ject/consciousness from the environment in which it is embedded. Even
a summary as cursory as this suggests the implications such a model
has for political and ethical considerations: at issue is the status and
limits of boundaries understood as constructed, and hence open to
change. On the question of a system and its context, Hayles notes that
‘For Bateson, decontextualization is not a necessary scientific move but
a systematic distortion’.65
A significant extension of the cybernetic model is necessary in order
to recast the limits of ‘organizational closure’. In so doing, it becomes
possible to acknowledge the ways in which networks of communica-
tion flows operate in autopoietic ways where media ecologies develop
as self-generating, distributed informational systems. Within the theory
of social systems developed by Niklas Luhmann, a system is a set of
possibilities whose relations are regulated, organized and distinguished
by combinatory forces of interpenetration-penetration, indeterminacy-
determination and contingency-stasis.66 Together, these features consti-
tute the conditions of possibility for change within a self-referential or
autopoietic system. For Luhmann, ‘In the self-referential mode of opera-
tion, closure is a form of broadening possible environmental contacts;
closure increases, by constituting elements more capable of being deter-
mined, the complexity of the environment that is possible for the sys-

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organized networks

tem’.67 Thus closure is temporary in the sense that closure offers a dis-
tinction or boundary that feeds back into the system, making change
and transformation possible.
Time is an important operation within any system. The multidimen-
sionality of time corresponds with the varying planes of abstraction
within which the movement between that which has emerged and the
conditions of possibility occur. Luhmann expresses the organizational
closure afforded by time and change within a system as follows: ‘“Time”
symbolizes the fact that whenever anything determinate occurs, some-
thing else also happens, so that no single operation can ever gain com-
plete control over its circumstances’.68 There is a seemingly paradoxical
aspect to the notion of organizational closure within autopoietic sys-
tems whereby the ongoing process of feedback in the form of incorpo-
rating entropy and perturbations conditions the future of the system.
Keith Ansell Pearson explains it like this:

The claim that autopoietic systems are organizationally ‘closed’ can

be misleading if it is taken to imply that these systems do not inter-
act with their environment. Such systems are simply closed in the
sense that the product of their organization is the organization
itself.69

Just as autopoiesis is understood as self-referentiality within the organi-

zation of organization, processual aesthetics can be understood as the
resonance of the sensation of sensation.70 Resonance is a feedback loop.
Moreover, processual aesthetics of new media occupy what philoso-
phers of science Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers call a ‘dissipative
structure’ that organizes and incorporates contingencies, non-linearities
and fluctuations into a dynamic state in ‘far-from-equilibrium condi-
tions’.71 A temporal dimension is reintroduced into the equation here,
since ‘dissipative structures seem to prolong indefinitely the fertile in-
stant of the genesis of structures’.72 Elsewhere, Stengers enticingly pro-
poses the following: ‘The contingent process invites us to “follow” it,
each effect being both a prolongation and a reinvention’.73 Put another
way, if a continuum of variation ceases to be, so too does communica-
tion within a system.

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 processual media theory

The Art of Day Trading

We are yet to see what capital can become. So goes the ‘New Econo-
my’ mantra as its proponents go about laying claim to the future, which
is synonymous with the ‘free market’. Mastery of the latter supposedly
determines the former.74 Bubble economies – exemplified in our time
most spectacularly by dotcom mania and the tech-wreck of 200075 –
are perhaps one index of the future-present where the accumulation of
profit proceeds by capturing what is otherwise a continuous flow of
information.76 Information flows are shaped by myriad forces that in
themselves are immaterial and invisible in so far as they do not register
in the flow of information itself. The condition of motion nevertheless
indelibly inscribes information with a speculative potential, enabling it
to momentarily be captured in the form of trading indices.

2. Artist at work and catchingafallingknife.com installation, Artspace, Sydney, 2002

Courtesy of Michael Goldberg.

Michael Goldberg’s installation at Sydney’s Artspace – catchingafalling-

knife.com – nicely encapsulates aspects of a processual media theory.77
The installation combines various software interfaces peculiar to the
information exchanges of day traders gathered around electronic cash

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organized networks

flows afforded by the buying and selling of shares in Murdoch’s News

Corporation. With $50,000 backing from an anonymous consortium of
stock market speculators cobbled together from an online discussion
list of day traders, Goldberg set himself the task of buying and selling
News Corp shares over a three week period in October-November, 2002.
Information flows are at once inside and outside the logic of com-
modification. The software design of market charts constitutes an inter-
face between what Felix Stalder describes as informational ‘nodes’ and
‘flows’.78 The interface functions to capture and contain – and indeed
make intelligible – what are otherwise quite out of control finance
flows. But not totally out of control: finance flows, when understood as
a self-generating system, occupy a space of tension between ‘absolute
stability’ and ‘total randomness’.79 Too much emphasis upon either
condition leaves the actor-network system open to collapse. Evolution
or multiplication of the system depends upon a constant movement or
feedback loops between actors and networks, nodes and flows.
Referring to the early work of political installation artist Hans
Haacke, Goldberg explains this process in terms of a ‘real-time system’:
‘The artwork comprises a number of components and active agents
combining to form a volatile yet stable system. Well, that may also
serve as a concise description of the stock market. . . . Whether or not
the company’s books are in the black or in the red is of no concern –
the trader plays a stock as it works its way up to its highs and plays it
as the lows are plumbed as well. All that’s important is liquidity and
movement. “Chance” and “probability” become the real adversaries and
allies’.80
Trading or charting software can be understood as stabilizing techni-
cal actors that gather informational flows, codifying such flows in the
form of ‘moving average histograms, stochastics, and momentum and
volatility markers’ (Goldberg). Indicators of this sort provide the basis
for ‘technical analysis’, which is concerned with discerning the move-
ment of prices according to the supply and demand of particular shares.
While simplistic, the attention paid to supply and demand as basic con-
cerns of financial management can be seen to correspond with the focus
cultural studies and new media empirics places on the conditions of
possibility and that which has emerged. In both instances a processual
dimension is overlooked: that is, the very movement within and

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 processual media theory

between these variables, which acts to continuously refigure both

conditions, challenging the assumption that the world exists in a state
of arrest.

3. 'Technical analysis' ('candle-stick') trading chart, catchingafallingknife.com

installation, Artspace, Sydney, 2002 Courtesy of Michael Goldberg.

Lash claims that ‘The feedback loop is the locus of the critique of in-
formation’.81 Software trading charts operate as a closed self-referential
and self-generating system: movement up or down the trajectory of a
graph is determined at one level by inputs of information that register
the value of a particular share. Yet at another level, the stochastic chart
is an interpenetrative system. That is, the movement of the graph is
contingent on a wider field of forces. For example, Goldberg notes in his
diary that he was unable to make a trade on a particular day. The Aus-
tralian Stock Exchange had gone down. Not only does this impact upon
the flow of information that enables the possibility of economic ex-
change, it also suggests the stability of a system interpenetrates with a
wider political economy that articulates with technical standards. In
this instance the maintenance of finance networks is subject to the vul-
nerability that attends concentrations of it infrastructures. Herein lies a
political and economic argument for distributed informational systems.

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organized networks

Chart-analysis software simulates the market situation, computing

the movement and value of stocks. However, chart analysis by a model-
ling program alone is insufficient. While the system is dynamic – in so
far as the reaction of the user manifests as the sale or purchase of stock,
which in turn feeds back into the system – the system is necessarily a
closed one. Parameters have to be defined that represent the effect vari-
ous data inputs have on likely market outcomes. Any simulation model
is thus based upon a principle of inclusion/exclusion. In his essay on
breakdowns within international stock market systems, Wulf Halbach
explains the construction of a simulation model as follows:

In order to create a model for any reality in question, as many details

and parameters must be taken into consideration as possible (also a
question of costs). The details and parameters chosen are the most
relevant – maximum parameters – and those that are left out are the
least influential – minimal parameters.82

By design, the simulation model reduces the complex field of forces that
shape the perception one might have of the market value of a particular
stock. That is, there is something more that comes to bear to shape the
perception and actualization of value. As Genosko writes, ‘The output
values feed back through the possible parameters, which re-engage the
minimal parameters, causing a crash in as much as the minimal param-
eters could not become maximal’.83 In other words, ‘the simulation is
unresponsive to its own terms!’ The field of emergence is comprised of
distributions of chaos, ‘not to mention fear, momentum, noise, caffeine-
induced phantasms, etc.’.84
The surfeit of force that escapes the parameters of chart-analysis soft-
ware is augmented by ‘fundamental analysis’. Fundamental analysis
looks ‘at the realities underlying price movements – broad economic de-
velopments, government policies, demography, corporate strategies’.85
Such market indicators are then rearticulated or translated in the form
of online chatrooms, financial news media, and mobile phone links to
stockbrokers, eventually culminating in the trade. In capturing and
modelling finance flows, trading software expresses various regimes of
quantification that enable a value-adding process through the exchange
of information within the immediacy of an interactive real-time system.

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 processual media theory

Such a process is distinct from ‘ideal time’, in which ‘the aesthetic con-
templation of beauty occurs in theoretical isolation from the temporal
contingencies of value’.86
The something more that escapes both the parameters of chart-analysis
software and fundamental analysis can be understood as ‘the question
of the constitutive gap between “reality” and simulations’.87 The aes-
thetic figure for this constitutive gap consists of the power of affect. An
affective dimension of aesthetics is registered in the excitement and
rush of the trade; biochemical sensations in the body modulate the flow
of information, and are expressed in the form of a trade. As Goldberg
puts it in a report to the consortium midway through the project after a
series of poor trades based on a combination of technical and funda-
mental analysis: ‘It’s becoming clearer to me that in trading this stock
one often has to defy logic and instead give in, coining a well-worn
phrase, to irrational exuberance’.88 Here, the indeterminacy of affect
subsists within the realm of the processual, where a continuum of rela-
tions defines the event of the trade. A continuity of movement prevails.
Yet paradoxically, such an affective dimension is coupled with an inten-
sity of presence where each moment counts; the art of day trading is
constituted as an economy of precision within a partially enclosed uni-
verse or system.
Wark makes a similar point in his analysis of the stock market crash
on Wall Street in October 1987. Drawing on Serres’ notion (or was it an
intuition?) of ‘noise as a “third man” present in the exchange of infor-
mation’, Wark employs the metaphor of noise to explain the ‘compet-
ing and contradictory interests’, irrationality, feedback loops and un-
conventional techniques used by traders arguably more attuned to the
informational patterns and flows in global finance markets.89 As Wark
puts it:

Noise becomes a tool among others in what Donald Trump chris-

tened ‘the art of the deal’. Profiting from noise becomes equivalent to
profiting from information, and in the short term, possibly more
profitable. The volume of movement caused by noise in the short
term may be more profitable than the tendency of movement in the
long run. Which is bad news for the fortunes of the firms that make
and sell things on the terrain of second nature. One can indeed make

189
organized networks

‘cash from chaos’, as the self-styled pop svengali Malcolm McLaren

proposed. The third nature of global finance, like the third nature of
global style, admits the false move as a profitable option.90

The borders of a processual system are also open to the needs and inter-
ests of extrinsic institutional realities. The node of the gallery presents
what is otherwise a routine operation of a day trader as a minor event,
one that registers the growing indistinction between art and commerce.
Interestingly, the event-space of the gallery expresses the regularity
of day trading with a difference that submits to the spatio-temporal
dependency news media has on the categories of ‘news worthiness’.
A finance reporter for Murdoch’s The Australian newspaper gives
Goldberg’s installation a write-up. Despite the press package which
details otherwise, the journalist attempts to associate Goldberg’s trading
capital with an Australia Council grant (which financed the installation
costs) as further evidence of the moral and political corruption among
the ‘chattering classes’. In this instance of populist rhetoric, the distinc-
tion between quality and tabloid newspapers is brought into question.
The self-referentiality that defines the mode of organization and pro-
duction within the mediasphere prompts a journalist from Murdoch’s
local Sydney tabloid, the Daily Telegraph, to submit copy on the event.
Unlike the dismissive account in The Australian and the general absence
of attention to the project by arts commentators, Goldberg notes how
the Daily Telegraph report made the front page of the Business section
(rather than the News or Entertainment pages), in full colour, with his
picture alongside the banner headline ‘Profit rise lifts News’. The head-
line for Goldberg’s installation was smaller: ‘Murdoch media the latest
canvas for artist trader’.
Here, the system of relations between art and commerce also indi-
cates the importance narrative or storytelling has in an age of informa-
tion economies. Whether the price of stocks go up or down, profit value
is shaped not, of course, by the kind of political critique art might offer,
but rather by the kind of spin a particular stock can generate. Or, as Neil
Chenoweth puts it in his book Virtual Murdoch, ‘Markets work on
appearances’.91 Goldberg’s installation discloses various operations
peculiar to the aesthetics of day trading, clearly establishing a link
between narrative, economy, time and risk, performance or routine

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practice and the mediating role of design and software aesthetics.

catchingafallingknife.com demonstrates that it is the latter – a theory of
software – that still requires much critical attention. And unlike most
players in the new economy, Goldberg’s installation is a model in
accountability and transparency.
There is a process at work in all this, part of which involves a linear
narrative of stabilization by structural forces. Massumi explains it this
way: ‘The life cycle of the object is from active indeterminacy, to vague
determination, to useful definition (tending toward the ideal limit of
full determination)’.92 Yet this seemingly linear narrative or trajectory,
if that’s what it can be termed, is in no way a linear process. Quite the
opposite. It is distributed or is constituted through and within a process
of feedback where the technical object, in its nominated form, feeds
back and transforms its conditions of possibility, which can be under-
stood as ‘the field of the emergence’.93
Given that the production of art has been ensconced within the cul-
tural industries throughout the twentieth-century – and most particu-
larly since the end of the Second World War – it really is remarkable
how little attention is given by artists and critics to the basic economic
conditions of production which make possible their very existence.
Certainly, there are exceptions, as evidenced in the case of Goldberg’s
installation. But for the most part, artists have failed to inquire into the
role of the economy as a constitutive force within and not outside of aes-
thetics. Yet strangely, both artists and critics seem to think the object or
process of art is somehow immune to or autonomous from prevailing
economic conditions. That strikes me as a hopelessly naïve and incredi-
bly self-undermining position to adopt.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting artists return to some kind of
social realist portrayal of workers in the factory and peasants in the
field. Nor am I calling on critics to revert back to vulgar Marxist ideolo-
gy critique. Let’s not bore ourselves with regressive pastiche that’s inca-
pable of addressing the situation of contemporary media cultures. By
engaging in a post-representational way with the economy, critical
artists have a key role to play in redistributing the contingency of rela-
tions between economic conditions and aesthetic sensibilities. Now is
the time to set a new aesthetic intelligence into play by creating new in-
stitutions of possibility, by organizing networks of sustainability, and

191
organized networks

by asserting a relationship between aesthetics and the economy in a

way that does not resign the artist to the role of yet another self-govern-
ing entrepreneur within a ‘creative economy’.

Towards a Politics of Processual Time

Media cross one another in time, which is no longer history.

Kittler94

I speak once more in the language of history, processual time and its
multiple circumstances pass through the cramped network of their
own monuments.
Serres95

The processual locates the temporal modes that operate within the in-
formation age. This is precisely why a processual model facilitates a po-
litical critique of network societies and information economies. Process-
es, after all, take time. That is, processes abstract time. A politics of legiti-
macy coextends with the instantiation of abstraction. Further, the fun-
damental problem with Lash’s thesis in his book Critique of Information
is his failure to engage with ‘the political’ by reducing the complexities
of time.96 Time is not simply ‘long duration’ that corresponds with old
media and its mode of representation, as distinct from the ‘short dura-
tion’ or immediacy that supposedly defines the new media as ephemer-
al presentations.97 Time consists of a multiplicity of modes: rhythmic,
instrumental, scalar, biological, compressed, flexible, and so forth. Each
temporal mode has a different function in the regulation, control and
organization of entropy. Irrespective of its encoding mode, time is an
agent of translation between stability and randomness. In this respect,
time corresponds to the processual.
Modalities of time are also central to the constitutive framework
within which politics happens. In the case of new media, a tension is
played out across the temporal modes that distinguish new media
forms and their concomitant uses and conditions of production. Each
temporal mode is socially inscribed with varying degrees of legitimacy.
For this reason, one can speak of a politics of time. New communica-
tions media consist of various temporal modes: mobile phones and in-

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stant short-text messaging, the web and real-time video and audio files,
the interactive real-time of day trading, 24/7 and net-time,98 and as
Wark notes, ‘many kinds of time intersect’.99 Whatever the operative
mode may be, time’s multiplicity is internally situational to self-organi-
zational closures or limits in social-technical complexity.100 The contest
over such closures thus constitutes the politics of technological time.
On the question of time and space, there are two key points to make.
First, new media are characterized by their ‘remediation’ of the spatio-
temporal aspects of old media.101 The form, content, meaning and tech-
niques of use peculiar to old media such as cinema and the novel are re-
fashioned and reformed within new media technologies. New media
technologies are thus better characterized in terms of the multidimen-
sional layers of space and modalities of time; there is a continuum of re-
lations, albeit reconfigured, rather than strict rupture between old me-
dia and new media. Referring to McLuhan, Kittler explains the media
continuum as ‘partially connected media links’ in the following way:

[O]ne medium’s content is always other media: film and radio consti-
tute the content of television; records and tapes the content of radio;
silent films and audiotape that cinema; text, telephone, and telegram
that of the semi-media monopoly of the postal system.102

Second, within a capitalist system, time determines exchange value in

as much as the smaller and more flexible the increment of time the
higher the exchange value. This operation also makes possible what
Marx termed the ‘annihilation of space through time’, where more
intensive cycles of production and consumption are required to speed
up capital circuits, as Harvey has analysed.103 And as Holmes has noted,
‘If capital can’t get the cycle speeds it needs, it lobbies for war – the ex-
change-value of armaments will go up as others deflate; capital flows to
war according to the law of equalization of value, until the war’s
over’.104 A processual model investigates the multiple, competing
dimensions of time that condition the instance of exchange. Exchange
value itself is processual, yet it appears as a simple linear instance of ex-
change. This feature is symptomatic of the politics of labour-power and
the ways in which the process of abstraction within a technologically
enriched capitalist system subsumes the field of forces that condition

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the instance of exchange. The processual model attempts to register the

complexity of forces and non-linearity of communications systems.
What is at stake, finally, is the question of the legitimacy of existence
that is irreducible to the techniques of instrumental time promulgated
by new media empirics.

Conclusion
More than anything, processuality is best understood as a mode of
communicating. For this reason, the processual is integral to media
theory. Communication is based upon relationships. Processual media
theory attempts to identify the diagram of relations peculiar to particu-
lar media-information situations and events. Such a task inevitably
addresses the operation of power as a constitutive force. Inquiries into
power relationships can happen in two key ways: first, under the
delusion of the detached, disinterested observer. Such an option is a
false one. And it is one this book resists in chapter 1, where I stage a
critique of non-governmental organizations and their relationship with
developing states and supranational entities. The issues outlined in that
chapter fold into a larger inquiry that underpins much of this book –
namely, how political activists might best organize themselves in ways
immanent to the media of communication as it articulates with the net-
work of social relations.
In its own modest way, this chapter, and indeed the remainder of this
book, engages with what Paul D Miller, a.k.a. dj Spooky that Subliminal
Kid, identifies as the problematic of our time: ‘[T]wenty-first-century aes-
thetics needs to focus on how to cope with the immersion we experi-
ence on a daily level’.105 This brings me to the second option in analyses
of power relations: immanent critique. Strange as it might sound, such
a mode of critique within this book is informed by the histories of colo-
nialism and the ravages and violence that attends epistemological and
ontological frameworks that assume one can be detached or separate
from a communicative situation. As the discussion in this chapter of
day trading makes clear, a rationalist approach to the problem of com-
munication systems is simply never going to work. While a direct en-
gagement with the histories and literature of colonialism is not present
in this book beyond a passing reference here and there, the lessons from
colonialism can be detected in the reflexive empiricism adopted within

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this book. Immanent critique, as developed most explicitly over the

previous two chapters, occupies a situation of reflexivity in terms of the
interrelationships between institutional settings, epistemological
frameworks and the media of communication.
These sorts of elements operate as constitutive forces in the develop-
ment of the case studies and objects of critique. The mode of critique
within a processual situation is never negative in the sense of negativity
being that which subtracts something from something else. Since
processuality consists of systems of relations that are mutually constitu-
tive, the immanent critique or radical empiricism of processual media
theory is an affirmative operation. This book has been motivated by
a curiosity and passion for the potentiality of transformation within
and intervention by networks of critical Internet researchers. Process,
in this sense, involves modes of experimentation as far as techniques of
critique and research go. I’m speaking here of something that Negri
calls a ‘tendential’ method, one that ‘consists of anticipating the value
of things that form an evolving system of tendencies, or trends, which
is to say things one thinks will end up coming to pass in the future’.106
The reason a degree of experimentation, chance and potential ‘defeat’
attend such a mode of inquiry has to do with the inescapable contingen-
cies of life as it subsists within media-information systems. Similarly,
processuality, as a mode of communication, is coextensive with what
Negri calls ‘forms of life’ that constitute the common.107 Life as it resides
within relations immanent to media of communication constitutes the
common of this book.

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6 Virtuosity, Processual Democracy
and Organized Networks

Language presupposes and, at the same time, institutes once again

the ‘publicly organized space’.
Paolo Virno

I am a Stalinist – everyone should do as I say and think; I have no idea

what I am – I don’t exist . . . . The contradiction between these two state-
ments signals a tension between identity politics and the politics of
desubjectification. Identity operates within a regime of coding; desub-
jectification is a process of subjectivization and transversality in which
‘relations are external to their terms’.1 There is nothing essential about a
particular object, subject or thing that determines its relations. The ex-
ternality of relations to their terms is what makes change possible. The
identity of the Stalinist emerges from a milieu of radical contingencies.
The individuation of the Stalinist is thus a potentiality that subsists
within the plane of immanence. The logic of coding is part and parcel
of the unforeseen capacities that define the outside of immanence.
The relationship between the overcoded subject and the process of
subjectivization is one of movement, and the movement between the
two comprises the force of processuality, and a politics of contingency
and potentiality. Stalinist subjects are everywhere – we are all Stalinists,
and we also don’t exist. The force of relations external to their terms op-
erate in a manner that continuously destabilizes the authoritarianism
of the Stalinist subject. The process of desubjectification corresponds
with the plane of immanence. This is the common from which exodus,
flight and exit subsist as potentialities – potentialities that can also be
found in the exploitation of cooperation that is the common of labour-
power.2
The analysis of these relations is a practice of radical empiricism.
Such an approach registers the ways in which the formation of coded
subjects (identity) is an internally generative operation within the dis-
tributed plane of subjectivization. As Antonio Negri has noted, ‘From
the standpoint of the body, there is only relation and process’.3 Such

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a diagram of relations can be transfigured upon organized networks,

whose capacity to develop new institutional formations is immanent to
the workings of situated social-technical systems.4 In both cases, there is
a danger of identitarianism (the Stalinist subject) or what Gary Genosko
calls ‘bureaucratic sclerosis’ (technicist institutions) overdetermining
the unforeseen creative capacity of the plane of immanence.5 I don’t
think it is too much a case of conceptual promiscuity to say that such
an event is kept in check through the hegemonic operation between
the coded subject and the constitutive force of the plane of immanence.
A continuum of negotiation and re-manoeuvring characterizes the
tension between the desire for rule on the part of the coded entity (be it
a particular subject or institutional habitus) and the potentiality of
difference and proliferation peculiar to the plane of immanence.
Summarizing the encounters between Félix Guattari and Italian
autonomous thinkers in the late 1970s, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi explains
the process of ‘subjectivation’ (or what I am terming subjectivization)
as a displacing of the historical legacy of the Hegalian subject.6 Berardi
sees the autonomist political concept and strategy of ‘refusal of work’ in
terms of processes of subjectivation. He considers the operaismo (work-
ers) movements in Italy during the 1960s and ’70s as an instantiation of
the larger international transition from Fordism to post-Fordism:

Refusal of work does not mean so much the obvious fact that work-
ers do not like to be exploited, but something more. It means that the
capitalist restructuring, the technological change, and the general
transformation of social institutions are produced by the daily action
of withdrawal from exploitation, of rejection of the obligation to pro-
duce surplus value, and to increase the value of capital, reducing the
value of life.

Berardi is resolute that it was the process of autonomization among

workers that ‘provoked’ the capitalist response of institutional and mar-
ket deregulation. As much as workers may have escaped the industrial
time of the factory, capital was awakened to new possibilities of manag-
ing time. The flexibilization of labour coupled with advances in infor-
mation and communication technologies enabled capital to intensify
the process of economic globalization. For Berardi, the transformation

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in the socio-technics of labour and production amounts to a ‘capitalist

takeover of social desire’, resulting in an ‘alliance between recombinant
capital and cognitive work’. As labour-power has become integrated
with the deterritorializing capacities of information technologies, the
effectiveness of political organizations such as unions has, in many in-
stances, declined. The result of this has been a tendency toward what
I called ‘disorganized labour’ as distinct from ‘immaterial labour’.
It is within such post-Fordist, informationized settings that the prob-
lematic of democracy has become renewed. Following the thesis ad-
vanced by Paolo Virno, I start with the premise that the decoupling of
the state from civil society and the reassertion of the multitudes over
the unitary figure of ‘the people’ coincides with a vacuum in political
institutions of the state.7 Against Mouffe’s promotion of an ‘agonistic
democracy’, I argue that the emergent idiom of democracy within net-
worked, informational settings is a non- or post-representative one that
can be understood in terms of processuality.8 I maintain that a non-rep-
resentative, processual democracy corresponds with new institutional
formations peculiar to organized networks that subsist within informa-
tionality. In contrast, Mouffe has a faith that is still too deeply invested
in political institutions of the modern state form and her agonistic
democracy depends heavily on the institutional legitimacy of the state.
As states across Western liberal democracies have increasingly dis-
engaged from discourses of political and social citizenship in favour of
the oxymoronic notion of individualized ‘shareholder-democracy’, the
legitimacy of the state as a complex of representative institutions is
only brought into greater question.
More significant for this book, which seeks to advance a political and
media philosophy of processuality, is Mouffe’s failure to recognize how
media forms and institutions and their attendant practices have inter-
penetrated the ordinary lives of people, most especially since the creep-
ing departure from the early 1980s onwards of the welfare state and its
social-political institutions. As I have argued elsewhere in this book, it
is important not to confuse the seeming disappearance of the state with
its transformation.9 We are witnessing the ongoing structural trans-
formation of state apparatuses in ways that reproduce the patterns of
change seen in a plethora of corporate, cultural and not-for-profit
institutions. The gestures and protocols of transparency once associated

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with and expected from public institutions have given way to a corpo-
rate culture of secrecy. The privacy that once, quite paradoxically,
‘deprived’10 individuals of a voice and public presence has now become
inverted: life within a reality-media complex voraciously extracts peo-
ple from under the radar, extending the social-technical capacities of
the mediasphere as the definitive organ of social and cultural legitima-
tion and value formation.11 Similarly, it has become routine practice for
the state to tender its social services and fiscal management to firms
that provide the best post-political packages for career politicians while,
more insidiously, retaining the right of privacy common to corporate
law – the ‘confidentiality agreement’ – that serves the interests of
protecting corporate-state negotiations. Whereas privacy within an era
of the bourgeois public sphere deprived the individual of a public
presence, perversely, privacy in an epoch of neoliberalism functions to
enhance the security of the corporate-state nexus.
Such changes in the way social relations are organized have not ad-
vanced toward some more enlightened, rational stage of social-political
development. Instead, on the one hand, they have resulted in capital ex-
tending its destructive capacity with a massive intensification in envi-
ronmental degradation associated with new techniques in agricultural
and industrial production, the expansion of urban infrastructures and
the demands by consumers for greater diversity of the same; in genera-
tions of people being left to live in poverty; and in technological ad-
vancements in the military-entertainment complex, which have fuelled
the political economy of corporate governments as they impose their
domestic agendas on minor states. Yet, on the other hand, the transfor-
mation of social relations and the techniques of organization more gen-
erally have coincided in recent years with a re-emergence and reasser-
tion of the multitudes – a mutable movement of movements whose tac-
tics of social-political intervention and cultural production have been
greatly facilitated by the widespread availability of relatively cheap new
media technologies associated with the Internet. Mailing lists, web cam-
paigns, real-time audio-streaming, the mobile phone and blogs have
played key roles in shaping the actions of tactical media. And, it should
be said, such technologies have also benefited the interests of global
capital. The difference between these two endeavours is one that runs
along the lines of values, interests, constituencies and desires.12 Hope is

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reasserting its force. The re-emergence of the multitudes as the inven-

tors of another possible world, along with the gradual dissolution of
supranational governing agencies such as the wto and the increasing
incapacity of powerful states such as the usa and Britain to manage
their pursuits of crisis, are all part of a proliferation of signals that indi-
cate the hegemony of neoliberalism is on the wane.
Against this backdrop, this chapter seeks to resituate Mouffe’s notion
of agonistic democracy as a radical pluralism within networked media
ecologies. Such a shift necessitates new models with which to think and
enact the possibility of radical democracy within a digital terrain. I de-
ploy the notion of media translation as the figurative passage that ush-
ers in the conditions for a processual democracy within network soci-
eties. With reference to the limits of both tactical media and traditional
institutional structures, the chapter argues how the persistence of or-
ganized networks as new institutional forms depends upon addressing
two key problematics: sustainability and scale. This chapter advances
an argument for political activists to make a strategic turn in order to
raise the stakes of what it means to live – and, indeed, how we live –
within informational societies. In as much as processuality corresponds
with social-technical networks of media-in-translation, so too do the
multitudes – as a mutable, proliferating social-technical expression of
life – hold the potential to create polities that support the ongoing for-
mation of life as an affirmative force.
Finally, the task of this chapter is to identify how and why an institu-
tional turn is now required among media activists. Of course there can
be no definitive programme for such a shift. Nevertheless, emergences
can be detected. ‘Movement’, writes Deleuze, ‘is translation in space.
Now each time there is a translation of parts in space, there is also a
qualitative change in the whole’.13 Transformations register on the
radar of this media-informational present and hold the capacity to
translate across social-technical networks in unforeseen ways. Pure
virtuality.

Virtuosity and Processual Democracy

Surplus value is based on excess – an excess of labour-power. With a
surplus of labour-power (unemployment), the cost of production de-
creases and profit rises. Labour-power, however, is predicated on coop-

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eration, and herein lies the potential for transformation, since coopera-
tion subsists in the plane of immanence, the common. The capacity for
the articulation of other values, and the mobilization of other affects is
immanent to the surplus value of labour-power. Surplus value can also
be understood as an individuation transduced from the pre-individuali-
ty of cooperation, of the ‘general intellect’. This is what Negri identifies
as the ‘ontology of the multitudes’. The cooperation peculiar to the sur-
plus value of labour-power grants what Hardt and Negri identify, and
had previously dismissed, as the class dimension of the emergent social-
technical form of the multitudes, since exploitation conditions the pos-
sibility of cooperation.14 The multitudes are co-extensive with coopera-
tion. Since the surplus value of capital is parasitic upon and condi-
tioned by cooperation, so too can the multitudes (cooperation) be un-
derstood as a class concept.
The organized network is a potentiality co-extensive with the
process of becoming instituted. Virtuosity, as the absence of an ‘extrin-
sic product’, institutes the political potential of organized networks.15
The virtuosos ‘activity without an end product’ is at once ordinary and
exceptional: ordinary in the sense that ‘the affinity between a pianist
and a waiter’, as anticipated by Marx, comprises the common of wage
labour in so far as ‘the product is inseparable from the act of producing’;
exceptional in the sense of the potential that subsists within perform-
ances with no end product holds the capacity of individuation – of
transformation of the common – into singularities with their own dis-
tinct universes of sensibility, logics of sensation, regimes of codifica-
tion.16 Institutions (coded formations) consist of practices and affects,
techniques and sensations. Institutions emerge within the interplay
between the plane of immanence and the plan of organization. Within
the cooperation common to surplus value’s exploitation of labour-
power resides the potential for new relations, new institutions, new
socialities.
Yet can we become democratic? Since – following Virno, a Deleuzo-
Foucauldian line, along with a strand within political philosophy and
international relations – the activities of the multitudes are exterior to
the idea of representation, which is the key procedure by which modern
democracy figures itself, how might democracy constitute itself within
contemporary social-technical networks? To ask this question is also to

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ask whether the mobilization of capacities within social-technical net-

works – or processes of translation which might incorporate computer
systems, software designers, cognitive workers, and so on – can produce
political institutions, or arrangements of the social. Moreover, and fol-
lowing Mouffe, it is to ask whether the realm of networks consist of or
are articulated with a material dimension, hence constituting a ‘poli-
tics’, which Mouffe defines in her book The Democratic Paradox as ‘the
ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions that seek to establish
a certain order and organize human coexistence in conditions that are
always potentially conflictual because they are affected by the dimen-
sion of “the political”’.17
In other words, to ask the question of democracy with respect to ac-
tors, networks, processes of translation and politics is, at a fundamental
level, to inquire into the power relations that condition the formation
of the social. If the modern is underpinned by processes of translation,
which might also be understood as ‘border wars’, then it might be said
that the multitudes, as ‘an infinity of singularities’ that brings bound-
aries into question, inhabit the abstracted spaces of the modern.18 As
I discuss below, part of this ‘border work’ of the multitudes corresponds
with what Virno identifies as the re-emergence of the multitudes as a
force with presence in a post-Fordist era of capitalism. First, however,
it is helpful to further distinguish the political concept of the multitude
from the logic of representation. As Negri explains:

Most generically, the multitude is diffident to representation because

it is an incommensurable multiplicity. The people is always repre-
sented as a unity, whilst the multitude is not representable, because
it is monstrous vis-à-vis the teleological and transcendental ratio-
nalisms of modernity.19

Virno suggests that the communicative performance of the multitudes

constitutes ‘the feasibility of a non-representational democracy’.20 Virno is
elusive when it comes to developing that proposition. A non- or post-
representational democracy is one that no longer operates within con-
stitutive framework of the nation-state and its associated institutions
and civil society organizations. This is something Mouffe’s ‘agonistic
democracy’ is not able to confront. While Mouffe correctly wishes to

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go beyond rational consensus, deliberative models of liberal democracy,

her proposition that agonistic democracies negotiate the antagonisms
that underpin sociality is nevertheless one that is predicated on the
maintenance of the state as modern complex of institutions. Mouffe has
not made the passage into the post-Fordist state and its connection with
capital’s modes of informatized production and flexible accumulation.
The informatization of social relations is nowhere to be found in
Mouffe’s thesis on agonistic democracy. As such, Mouffe is unable to
describe the new modes of sociality, labour and politics as they are or-
ganized within network societies and information economies. Even so,
her notion of an agonistic democracy – like Virno’s non-representation-
al democracy – can be retained, but only, I would suggest, when they are
recast in terms of what I call a processual democracy. How might the poli-
tics of networks as they operate within informationalized institutional
settings be understood in terms of a processual democracy?
A processual model of social-technical operations inquires into the
movement between the conditions of possibility and that which has
emerged within the grid of signs, codes and meanings – or what Deleuze
understands as the immanent relationship between the plane of consis-
tency and the plan of organization.21 Conditions of possibility are dif-
ferent in kind from that which comes to be conditioned. There is no re-
semblance or homology between the two. Think back to the difference
between the process of subjectivization and the Stalinist identity. There
are relations between the two, but they are not of the same. External
forces are not grids whose stabilizing capacity assures the intelligibility
of a problematic as it coalesces within a specific situation.
Yet despite these dissonances, networks are defined by – perhaps
more than anything – their organization of relations between actors, in-
formation, practices, interests and social-technical systems. The rela-
tions between these terms may manifest at an entirely local level, or
they may traverse a range of scales, from the local to the national to the
regional to the global. Whatever the scale may be, these fields of associ-
ation are the scene of politics and, once they are located within institu-
tional settings, are the basis of democracy in all its variations. A proces-
sual democracy goes beyond the state-civil society relation. That rela-
tion no longer exists. Processual democracies necessarily involve insti-
tutions, since institutions function to organize social relations. This

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isn’t to say that in and of themselves the modulation of networks some-

how automatically results in democracy. But it is to suggest that the
processes by which networks undergo a scalar transformation signal
the emergence of new institutional forms that are shaping politics as
a non-representational idiom.
The potential of processual democracies is underpinned by the in-
formatization of social relations. Berardi’s model of the infosphere and
the psychosphere is a useful one to describe the complex settings with-
in which new polities may emerge.22 Berardi’s conception of the infos-
phere as a technical, digital coding of data whose unilinear flows ‘inter-
mingle’ with the unstable, recombinatory filter of the psychosphere is,
however, only partially right.23 The infosphere is, of course, much more
complex. Think of the uneven geography of information, the political
economy of root servers and domain names, and the competing inter-
ests surrounding Internet governance debates and policy-making.
The infosphere thus not only ‘intermingles’ with the psychosphere, it is
inseparable from it: put in different terms, the real is always inscribed
or present within the symbolic as an antagonism or trauma. The infos-
phere is shaped by background noise, which Michel Serres defines as
the ‘absence of code’.24 Processuality – the relationship between coding
and conditions of possibility – incorporates background noise as a con-
stitutive outside.
A processual democracy unleashes the unforeseen potential of af-
fects as they resonate from the common of labour-power. Processual
democracies also continue to negotiate the ineradicability of antago-
nisms. Their difference lies in the affirmation of values that are internal
to the formation of new socialities, new technics of relations. Certainly,
they go beyond the limits of resistance and opposition – the primary ac-
tivity of tactical media and the ‘anti-corporatization’ movements. This
is not to dispense with tactics of resistance and opposition. Indeed, such
activities have in many ways shaped the emergence of civil society val-
ues into the domain of supranational institutions and governance, as
witnessed in the World Summit on the Information Society debates. A
radical adaptation of the rules of the game is a helpful way of thinking
the strategic dimension of processual democracies.

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Organized Networks
My argument is that in order for networks to organize mobile infor-
mation in strategic ways that address the issues of scale and sustainabil-
ity, a degree of hierarchization, if not centralization, is required. Let’s
not forget that for all the anti-state rhetoric of anarchists, they, like
many ‘radical’ outfits, are renowned for being organized in highly hier-
archical ways – typically around the cult of the alpha male. The point is
that such organization occurs within the media of communication.
Herein lies the difference between the organized network and the net-
worked organization.25 The latter consists, quite simply, of networking
traditional institutional settings. The architectural configuration of the
building provides the skeletal framework within which electronic and
social networking is negotiated. Certainly, this is not as entirely
straightforward as bringing in the stooges to refit the shell, like we see
in all those house renovation and lifestyle tv shows that appeal to our
aspirational fantasies. No doubt many people have heard of, if not di-
rectly experienced, the difficulties faced by many workers who over the
past couple of decades had to adjust to the computerization of work en-
vironments.26 Such changes require the acquisition of new skills and a
transformation of habits. And this affects many, from the cognitariat to
those engaged in more menial forms of labour. Nonetheless, the distinc-
tion remains: the techniques of governance within the networked or-
ganization, unlike the organized network, do not place a primacy on the
media of communication. Or rather, bricks and mortar prevail as the
substrate within which communication and social-technical relations
are managed.
Organized networks, on the other hand, hold an entirely different
range of potentialities with regard to the orchestration of social-techni-
cal relations. While organized networks principally consist of online
forms of communication such as mailing lists, ircs or newsgroups, it
would be a mistake to overlook the importance of face-to-face meetings
– or ‘fleshmeets’ or ‘meatspaces’, as the 1990s style cyberspeak would
have it. Such occasions are crucial if the network is to maintain mo-
mentum, revitalize energy, consolidate old friendships and discover
new ones, recast ideas, undertake further planning activities, and so on.
Different spaces, different temporalities, different media of communica-
tion, different mediations of sociality. This is mediology. Translation is

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the media logic that makes possible a continuum of relations between

one social-technical form of mediation and another. There is no a priori
smoothness that defines a continuum of relations.27 Frequently enough
tensions are going to prevail. Antagonisms may indeed be immanent
to the process of translation. Any media translation involves an engage-
ment with ‘the political’. Such is the relationship between the plane of
consistency and the plane of organization. Both coexist within a field
of sociality. It helps, then, to invent a media theory of these kinds of
relations as a way of making intelligible and actionable the politics of
informationality.
It is time to make a return to and reinvestment in strategic concepts,
practices and techniques of organization. Let’s stop the obsession with
tactics as the modus operandi of radical critique, most particularly in
the gross parodies of de Certeau one finds in us-style cultural studies.28
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not suggesting that the time of tactical media
is over. Clearly, tactical media play a fundamental role in contributing
to the formation of radical media cultures and new social relations. If
one starts with the principle that concepts and practices are immanent
to prevailing media forms, and not somehow separate from them, it fol-
lows that with the mainstream purchase of new media forms such as
the Internet come new ways in which relations of production, distribu-
tion and consumption are organized. An equivalence can be found in
the shift from centralized Fordist modes of production to decentralized
post-Fordist modes of flexible accumulation. Strategies within the spa-
tio-temporal peculiarities of the Internet are different from strategies as
they operate within broadcast communications media. The latter ulti-
mately conceives the ‘audience-as-consumer’ as the end point in the
food chain of media production, whereas the former enables the ‘user’
to have the capacity to sample, modify, repurpose and redirect the so-
cial life of the semiotic object. Moreover, there are going to be new ways
in which institutions develop in relation to Internet-based media cul-
ture. How such institutions of organized networks actually develop in
order to obtain a degree of sustainability and longevity that has typical-
ly escaped the endeavours of tactical media is something that is only be-
ginning to become visible.
Ultimately, the networked organization is distinguished by its stand-
ing reserve of capital and its exploitation of the potentiality of labour-

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power. Such institutions are motivated by the need to organize social

relations in the hope of maximizing ‘creativity’ and regenerating the de-
sign of commodity forms that have long reached market saturation.29
Virno’s observation that post-Fordist ‘labor has acquired the traditional
features of political action’ – thus reversing Hannah Arendt’s thesis that
politics is subsumed into the experience of labour – is a forceful one evi-
denced within the informational industries by the migration of tactical
media style practices into more traditional institutional settings of both
capital and its substrate, the neoliberal state.30 Virno notes that the pre-
viously distinct and traditionally indisputable boundaries between
labour, action and intellect have now become indiscernible within post-
Fordist modes of production.31 As Virno writes: ‘the world of so-called
post-Fordist labour has absorbed into itself many of the typical charac-
teristics of political action . . . this fusion between Politics and Labour
constitutes a decisive physiognomic trait of the contemporary multi-
tude’.32 This move of the multitudes into the sphere of post-Fordist pro-
duction clearly signals the operation of the constitutive outside. But
there are vital issues at stake here: issues of how a life is to be constitut-
ed, how it is to be invented within the network of relations that popu-
late the common of creative potentiality. The clear danger is that
politics, as ‘a difference which makes a difference’, becomes nothing
more than market strategies aimed at commodity differentiation.33
By contrast, the kind of emergent organized networks that I’m speak-
ing of are notable for the ways in which information flows and social-
technical relations are organized around site-specific projects that place
an emphasis on process as the condition of outcomes. The needs, inter-
ests and problems of the organized network coincide with its emer-
gence as a social-technical form, whereas the traditional modern insti-
tution has become networked in an attempt to recast itself while retain-
ing its basic infrastructure and work practices, clunky as they so often
are. Strangely enough the culture of neoliberalism conditions the emer-
gence of the organized network. The logic of outsourcing has demon-
strated that the state still requires institutions to service society. Scale
and cost were the two key objections ‘econorats’ and servants to neo-
liberalism responded to. Forget about ideology. These bureaucrats are
highly neurotic, obsessive-compulsive types. They hate any trace of dis-
order and inefficiency, and the welfare state embodied such irritations.

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The organized network can take advantage of such instituted patholo-

gies by becoming an educational ‘service provider’, for instance. The key
is to work out what values, resources and capacities distinguish your
network from the mit model of ‘free courseware’.34 The other factor is to
work out a plan for sustainability – a clear lesson from the dotcom era.
With the multitudes situated in post-Fordist modes of production, an
opportunity presents itself – the opportunity to mobilize what Virno
calls the ‘pure potential’ of labour-power as an ethico-aesthetic force
into the process of eradicating capital’s predisposition to marshal the
mode of production toward ‘effective labour’ as a service provision.

Translation, Transduction and Individuation

Code is a language whose precondition is the possibility for meaning
to be produced. Similarly, and like the relationship between the plane
of immanence and the plane of organization, individuation consists of a
process that Deleuze, Virno and Mackenzie call a pre-individual reality:
‘Something common, universal and undifferentiated’.35 Singularities
emerge out of common capacities: of language, of perception, of produc-
tion.36 Transduction is the complex of forces through which the process
of individuation translates pre-individual realities – that which is com-
mon – into singularities. As Adrian Mackenzie explains:

The main point is that transduction aids in tracking processes that

come into being at the intersection of diverse realities. These diverse
realities include corporeal, geographical, economic, conceptual,
biopolitical, geopolitical and affective dimensions. They entail a
knotting together of commodities, signs, diagrams, stories, practices,
concepts, human and non-human bodies, images and places. They
entail new capacities, relations and practices whose advent is not al-
ways easy to recognize. . . . Every transduction is an individuation in
process.37

The organized network as a new institutional formation is another ex-

ample of the stabilizing capacity of transductive forces. The primary dif-
ference, however, is that organized networks are shaped by the power
of social-technical needs, interests, affects and passions that hold the
potential to translate into new institutional forms. All communication

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is a process of translation. Networks are uneven, heterogeneous modu-

lations and combinations of communication in and through which
translation is intrinsic to the connectivity of information as it encoun-
ters technical, social, political, economic and cultural fields of articula-
tion, negotiation and transference. Translation, then, is about making
connections between seemingly incommensurate things and objects.
Translation conditions the possibility of communication, transversali-
ty, transduction, intensity and individuation between different
systems.38 From the connection emerges a new logic, a new sensibility
and new capacities. At a very basic level, the logic of networks is the
process of connectivity.
Networks have the capacity of transduction, which Adrian Macken-
zie, via Gilbert Simondon, describes as a process of ontogenesis ‘in
which a metastability emerges’ within biological and social-technical
systems.39 Or as Andrew Murphie puts it, ‘transduction translates inten-
sities so that they can be brought into individuating systems’.40 The
form of organized networks provides a mutable architecture in which
matter is temporarily arrested within a continuum of differentiation
and individuation. Transductive forces subsist within the relation be-
tween form and matter. The organized network can be considered as a
new institutional actant whose political, economic and expressive ca-
pacities are shaped and governed by the metastability of the network
system. The intelligibility of such arrangements, relations and informa-
tional flows is thus most accurately summarized by a theory of transla-
tion which incorporates processes of transduction. Translation is truly
a concept of praxis. It is part and parcel of every network. Transduction
conditions the possibility of organized networks as emergent institu-
tional entities.
At the start of this chapter I made passing reference to the way in
which the ‘citizen-subject’ has been supplanted by the individual who
engages not with a democratic state but a shareholder-democracy. It’s
important to carefully distinguish the sense of individualization evoked
here from the Simondonian idea of individuation. The former has been
addressed by sociologists such as Beck and Lash in terms of individual
subjects engaged in the self-management of ‘risk’ peculiar to the era of
‘second modernity’, while the latter, as discussed by Deleuze, Mackenzie
and Virno, is understood as a processual ethico-political cartography of

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potentiality. Individuation is a process by which a multitude of subjec-

tivities emerge from that which is common: living labour, life, general
intellect, cooperation, sociality, exploitation by capital, and so on. The
organized network carries the potential for the individuation of subjec-
tivities into new institutional forms. This process is one of political in-
vention. Individuals become individuated, organizing as multitudes,
creating the potential for the emergence of instituted singularities. Beck
and Lash, on the other hand, reduce and thus dismiss the possibility of
institutional life as specific to an industrial era of risk society, or ‘first
modernity’, which has been surpassed by an era of ‘second modernity’
characterized by disorganization, informationization and networks.
Beck initiates his book What is Globalization? with a rendition of the
bleak outlook held by ‘postmodernists’ and neoliberal ideologues alike,
who, by Beck’s reckoning, associate the crisis of democratic polities
with the erosion of traditional institutional forms. This shift arises as a
result of ‘the secular trend of individualization’, which effects a loosening
of social bonds.41 Accompanying this trend, according to Beck’s sum-
mation of the general discourse on economic globalization, is a society
that has lost its ‘collective self-consciousness and therefore its capacity
for political action’.42 Beck dismisses this fatalistic scenario in which
the totalizing effects of economic globalization debilitate political ac-
tion, though he sees such a discourse as little more than the incapacity
of people to advance out the imbroglio of some kind of false-conscious-
ness.43 Beck’s faith in the possibility of an alternative political culture is
evidenced by the political actions undertaken by global civil society
movements, which operate within a different dimension or layer of
what he refers to as the experience of ‘globality’ – or a ‘world society’
conceived of as a ‘multiplicity without unity’, as distinct from processes
of economic ‘globalization’ and the neoliberal ideology of ‘globalism’.44
Certainly, Beck is correct to observe that the remodelling of the state
within a neoliberal ideology has seen a shift of the modern state form
away from the social. Yet he is mistaken, I would maintain, to see the
decoupling of sociality from politics as corresponding with a decline in
institutional forms and their techniques of organizing social relations
within political frameworks. Not only does Beck overlook the contin-
ued purchase the state has on the management of everyday lives –
think, for example, of the legal authority institutions of the state have

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in both the movement of peoples and the flow of information (for ex-
ample, the wto’s trips Agreement in 1995 and the bond with member
states, enhanced national security measures with regard to the move-
ment of individuals, and free-trade agreements that determine the com-
position of cultural commodities) – but, more significantly, he greatly
underestimates the fundamental importance that institutions in a gen-
eral sense play in the organization of social relations. Moreover, in
terms of how to begin both theorizing and undertaking political action
in a sustained manner within an informational society, the futility of
Beck’s position, by my reading, lies in its failure to recognize and imag-
ine the ways in which the multitudes incorporate a strategic potential
that can manifest in the creation of new institutional forms.
Lash arrives at a similar conclusion to Beck. Lash considers the shift
from ‘first modernity’ to ‘second modernity’ as paralleling the decline of
organizations (such as the firm, the institution, unions and the family)
and the emergence of disorganizations (such as youth subcultures,
criminal gangs, computer designers and the ‘neo-family’).45 There is an
implicit assumption here that, firstly, ‘disorganized capitalism’ is in-
deed disorganized – capital, here, is much better understood in my view
in terms of what Harvey calls ‘flexible accumulation’.46 The rise of
transnational capital has not at all meant that the firm or institution
loses its hegemony as an architectonic form involved in the manage-
ment of social relations and economic production. Far from it. Disorga-
nized capitalism simply means that capital is organized differently. The
primary activity by capital of organizing labour-power in order to effect
production, distribution and exchange has not disappeared. Rather, it is
dispersed and relocated on the basis of currency exchange rates, the cost
of labour, taxation rates, government incentives (or, more properly,
corporate welfare), levels of technical infrastructure and supporting
service industries. Herein lies the flexibility of capital. Secondly, Lash
assumes precisely the linear model that he seeks to reject, claiming that
disorganized capital results in disorganized sociality. Disorganized
capital is capital organized by different means. Similarly, ‘disorganized
sociality’, consists, at least within the logic of informationality, of social
relations organized in ways that are immanent to prevailing communi-
cations media. Lash is correct on this point, albeit without comprehend-
ing the ways in which a constitutive outside operates within the plane

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of immanence. The overdetermining binary system by which Lash

secures his logic of disorganizations is worth quoting at length:

Organizations and the ‘power resources’ that reside in organizations

stand thus in no way in contradiction to the individualization
process of high modernity. Indeed, individualization is the comple-
ment, the other side of this organizational power. Organizational
power is the condition of existence of individualization, and individ-
ualization is the condition of existence of organizations . . . What I
want to argue, however, is that organizations and their accompany-
ing power, and indeed individualization as we know it, are decaying
social forms . . . What is emergent is not so much organizations as
disorganization, not so much individualization as sociality, and not
so much power as violence . . . Disorganizations are not the absence
of organization, but the decline of organizations. The decline of or-
ganized capitalism does entail a decline in organization and a rise in
individualism. But it also entails a rise in certain forms of sociation
that are non-organizational, indeed often non-institutional. So disor-
ganizations are not the absence of sociation, but particular forms of
sociation. They are chaos, not chaotic . . . Disorganizations presume a
certain level and a particular mode – or should we say singular mode
– of individualization, though they are somehow at the same time
much more collective than are organizations. Disorganizations pre-
sume a different mode of individualization than organizations, they
presume a non-utilitarian, non-strategic, non-identical mode of indi-
vidualization . . . Disorganizations are perhaps less hierarchical than
horizontal. They are anti-system – they are too open to interference
and invasion from the environment to be systems.47

To dismiss the technics of organization enlisted by the new social

movements is to rob them of vitality, and of the great urgency that now
beckons the multitudes to register their political potential on another
scale, and with a capacity for sustainability that has hitherto evaded
this common plurality of living labour. Or as Paul Miller puts it, ‘What
differentiates today from yesterday is the scale and scope of the para-
digm’.48 Just as the pre-individual is common to the process of individ-
uation, whereby capacities are that which are shared and coextensive,

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 virtuosity, processual democracy

so too the organized network as a new institutional form corresponds

with the pre-individual as that which is held in common. Let me un-
pack this. If political and corporate institutions within an industrial era
of ‘first modernity’ typically functioned to de-individualize the worker
in terms of a common unit to be managed, then such institutions reify
the worker as a mass and incapacitate the individual through the con-
formist unity of ‘effective labour’, ‘the people’ or ‘the citizen’. In other
words, the potential of labour-power as a common set of capacities –
what Hardt and Negri understand as ‘linguistic, communicational and
affective networks’ – is subordinated to the mode of production.49 Virno
explains: ‘The capitalist production relation is based on the difference
between labor-power and effective labor. Labor-power, I repeat, is pure
potential, quite distinct from its correspondent acts’.50 Moreover, it is this
potential of labour-power that is of primary value for the capitalist.
Virno again:

Potential is something non-present, non-real; but in the case of

labour-power, this non-present something is subject to the laws of
supply and demand. Capitalists buy the capacity for producing as
such (‘the sum of all physical and intellectual aptitudes which exist
in the material world’), and not simply one or more specific servic-
es.51

Such a notion of labour-power suggests that the 1960s and ’70s autono-
mist mantra and radical worker movement’s political strategy of a ‘re-
fusal of work’ is perhaps more clearly expressed in terms of ‘a refusal of
potentiality’ as it is subsumed by capital. Thus the key strategy for the
multitudes is to secure their production of potentiality and direct it to-
ward self-generating ends. The pure potential of labour-power turns on
an important distinction that Virno reads into the ‘mode of production’.
Not only is ‘mode of production’ to be understood as ‘one particular eco-
nomic configuration’, writes Virno, ‘but also [as] a composite unity of
forms of life, a social, anthropological and ethical cluster’.52 The process
of individuation subsists within and emerges from this commons as a
plurality of differences. A mode of producing. The combinations,
arrangements and expressions of these relations constitutes an ‘ethical
cluster’. An event. To be in relation is to become ethical. A productive

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organized networks

force is at work. Individuation is a process of becoming individual with-

in a multiplicity of relations. Thus, ‘the individual is not just a result,
but an environment of individuation’.53 Within the social-technical
environment of informationality emerges the organized network as
a potentiality coextensive with the process of becoming instituted.

Conclusion
While I have been arguing for the need for organized networks to
create – or what Berardi calls the unforeseen capacity to invent – new
institutional forms, let me emphasize that such activity is not some
kind of end in itself.54 ‘It is not a question of “seizing power”’, as Virno
writes of the force of the multitude, ‘of constructing a new State or a
new monopoly of decision-making; rather, it has to do with defending
plural experiences, forms of non-representative democracy, of non-
governmental usages and customs’.55 The invention by the multitudes
of new institutional forms, and the persistence of their attendant
practices, is part of a process that exists within a larger and more
complex field of critical Internet cultures. Such developments can
only occur when the networks are attentive to the technological
composition of communications media as that which consists of social-
technical relationships.56
In order for tactical media and the movements to organize as net-
works that have multiple institutional capacities, there has to be – first
and foremost – an intellect, passion and commitment to invention.
There has to be a desire for social-technical change and transformation.
And there needs to be a curiosity and instinct for survival to shift fi-
nance capital to places, people, networks and activities that hitherto
have been invisible. The combination of these forces mobilizes informa-
tion in ways that hold an ethico-aesthetic capacity to create new institu-
tional forms that persist over time and address the spectrum of social-
political antagonisms of information societies in a situated fashion.
The concept of the multitudes is a seductive one. It presents the ‘radi-
cal intellectual’ with an image of passion, change and, yes, even unity,
which corresponds with an image of ‘radical politics’ as seen in the
news media. The terribly dull thing about the multitudes is that ‘they’ –
as a plurality of differences, a movement of movements, a performance
‘with no end-product’ – are not composed of ‘enlightened’, ‘ordinary’

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 virtuosity, processual democracy

people who enact the fantasies of the radical intellectual. In many ways,
the multitudes are a distribution of disorganized, individualized work-
ers – in the sense that Beck and Lash mean by this term – who possess a
potential to encounter the transductive force of individuation that
shifts the individualization of labour-power into a singularity with net-
worked capacities. My argument throughout much of this book has
been that such a transformation is conditioned by a capacity to become
organized.

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Notes

Introduction
1 See Paul Di Maggio (ed.), The Twenty-First Century Firm: Changing Economic Organization in Internation-
al Perspective, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001; Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, ‘From Pre-
carity to Precariousness and Back Again: Labour, Life and Unstable Networks’, Fibreculture Journal 5
(2005), http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/neilson_rossiter.html.
2 See Ulrich Beck, The Brave New World of Work, trans. Patrick Camiller, Cambridge: Polity, 2000; David
Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005; Nigel Thrift, Knowing
Capitalism, London: Sage, 2005.
3 As I discuss at greater length below and in chapters 1 and 2, representation in its party-political sense
is antithetical to the logic of networks. See also Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, trans. James
Cascaito, Isabella Bertoletti, and Andrea Casson, forw. Sylvère Lotringer, New York: Semiotext(e),
2004.
4 Andrew Murphie defines the term ‘technics’ ‘as a combination of technologies, systematic processes
and techniques, whether these are found in the organization of living or non-living matter’. I adopt
this sense of technics throughout this book. See Andrew Murphie, ‘The World as Clock: The Network
Society and Experimental Ecologies’, Topia: A Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 11 (Spring, 2004):
136. See also Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1934; Bruno
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1993; Christopher May, The Information Society: A Sceptical View, Cambridge: Polity, 2002.
5 The collaborative political concept of organized networks is one I have developed with Geert Lovink,
Brett Neilson and Soenke Zehle. See, for instance, Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter, ‘Dawn of the Organ-
ised Networks’, Fibreculture Journal 5 (2005),
http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/lovink_rossiter.html.
6 The characteristics of different forms of networks were the topic of debate on the Nettime mailing
list. See the archive for April, 2006, http://www.nettime.org.
7 Neilson and Rossiter, ‘From Precarity to Precariousness’.
8 Here, I differ from Phil Agre, who sees complentarities between what he calls the ‘commodity model’
and the ‘community model’ in the ‘institutional design of the university’. While there is much with
which I agree in Agre’s essay, my position does not see an affinity between the concept of communi-
ties and that of organized networks. Agre tends to conceive communities and new institutions as
spaces of consensus, whereas I would take an opposite line: the social-technical dimensions of organ-
ized networks are better understood in terms of dissensus. Both economic and institutional design
implications follow on from this distinction, which I develop throughout this book. See Phil Agre,
‘Commodity and Community: Institutional Design for the Networked University’, in Kevin Robbins
and Frank Webster (eds), The Virtual University? Knowledge, Markets and Managment, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001, pp. 210-223.
9 Mike Newnham, ‘Foreword’, in Paul Miller and Paul Skidmore, Disorganisation: Why Future Organisa-
tions must ‘Loosen Up’, London: Demos, 2004, p. 9. Available at: http://www.demos.co.uk/files/Disor-
ganisation.pdf. Founded in 1993 by Marxist journalists and then positioning itself as an organ of
Blair’s New Left government, Demos defines itself as a think-tank for ‘everyday democracy’.
10 Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and
Everyday Life, New York: Basic Books, 2002.
11 Geert Lovink holds another view: ‘in my experience the call for disorganization has to be read as an
attempt to crack up the closed structures of the firm, due to ip regimes, but also firewalls and most of

216
 notes

all the knowledge management systems. These are the main obstacles to introducing blogs and social
network tools within organizations, be it for profit or non-profit’. It’s at this point that questions of
technical systems and organizational form come into play. Geert Lovink, email correspondence, 20
July, 2006.
12 This is not to regress to the equally deluded position of social-democratic politics – an accusation
enough so-called autonomist and anarchist activists have levelled against me in the past.
13 Mario Tronti, ‘The Strategy of Refusal’, trans. Red Notes, in Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi
(eds), Italy: Autonomia, Post-Political Politics, New York: Semiotext(e), 1980, pp. 28-35. I am drawing
from a longer version of the essay available at: http://www.libcom.org/library/strategy-refusal-mario-
tronti.
14 This was a point raised by Soenke Zehle and others at the close of Incommunicado.05: Information Tech-
nology for Everybody Else, Amsterdam, 16-17 June, 2005, http://incommunicado.info/conference. Geert
Lovink and Christoph Spehr discuss the topic further in their text ‘Out-Cooperating Empire: Ex-
change on Creative Labour and the Hyrbid Work of Collaboration’, 2006. Available at:
http://www.networkcultures.org/geert/2006/07/08/out-cooperating-the-empire-exchange-with-
christoph-spehr/.
Earlier incarnations of the topic can be found in the various texts associated with the Free Cooperation
conference organized by Trebor Scholz and Geert Lovink, Buffalo, New York, April 24-25, 2004,
http://freecooperation.org/. Collected papers from that event have been published in Geert Lovink
and Trebor Scholz (eds), The Art of Online Collaboration, New York: Autonomedia, 2006. See also the In-
stitute for Distributed Creativity, http://distributedcreativity.org/.
15 This process is discussed and analysed at length in Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Me-
dieval to Global Assemblages, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
16 For a history of La Borde, see Gary Genosko, Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction, London and New
York: Continuum, 2002; Félix Guattari, ‘La Borde: A Clinic Unlike Any Other’, trans. D. L. Sweet, in
Chaosophy, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, Semiotext(e): New York, 1995, pp. 187-208.
17 Gary Genosko, ‘Félix Guattari: Towards a Transdisciplinary Metamethodology’, Angelaki 8.1 (2003):
29.
18 Ibid., p. 35.
19 See the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA), uk, partnership pro-
grammes for ‘Futurelab’, ‘FameLab’ and ‘Zero-to-Hero’, http://www.nesta.org.uk/insidenesta/hwf_ex-
tend.html.
20 My gloss here is derived from Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political
Significance, trans. Michael Robertson, Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1994. See also Martin Jay, The Di-
alectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
21 Max Horkheimer, ‘The Present Situation of Social Philosophy’, in Between Philosophy and Social Sci-
ence: Selected Early Writings, trans. G Frederick Hunter, Matthew S. Kramer, and John Torpey, Cam-
bridge, Mass: mit Press, 1993, p. 9.
22 An interesting connection can perhaps be made here with Virno on the instituting of the multitude:
‘Multitude is the form of social and political existence for the many, seen as being many: a permanent
form, not an episodic or interstitial form’. A Grammar of the Multitude, p. 21. My emphasis.
23 See Wiggershaus, pp. 431-435.
24 Ibid., p. 434.
25 Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: the Absent Centre of Political Ontology, London: Verso, 1999, p. 74.
26 Comment made by Holmes at the Finnish Social Forum, Helsinki, 1-2 April, 2006. See video recordings
of talks by Brian Holmes, Carlos Fernández, Ned Rossiter and Stevphen Shukaitis and the follow-up
discussions at: http://www.m2hz.net/uusityo/index.php?title=Kommunikaatio.
27 Angela Mitropoulos and Brett Neilson, ‘Exceptional Times, Non-Governmental Spacings, and Impo-
litical Movements’, Vacarme (January, 2006), http://www.vacarme.eu.org/article484.html.
28 Obviously there are exceptions – here I am thinking of the important work by researchers such as
Angela McRobbie, Rosalind Gill, Toby Miller and George Yúdice. See also the special issue on creative
industries and cultural policy in the International Journal of Cultural Policy 11.1 (2005), edited by David

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organized networks

Hesmondhalgh and Andy C. Pratt. Essays on creative industries in Mute Magazine’s (February, 2005)
special issue on precarity are a standout example of political critique,
http://www.metamute.org/?q=en/taxonomy/term/178.
29 Creative Industry Task Force: Mapping Document, dcms (Department of Culture, Media and Sport)
(1998/2001), London,
http://www.culture.gov.uk/global/publications/archive_2001/ci_mapping_doc_2001.htm?proper-
ties=archive%5F2001%2C%2Fcreative%5Findustries%2FQuickLinks%2Fpublications%2Fde-
fault%2C&month=.
30 Up until this point I have rendered the constitutive outside as a constituent force. I adopt the former
throughout this book despite the appeal the notion of a constituent outside holds. My reference here is
to Negri, who makes a distinction between the concept of ‘constituent power’ and ‘constituted pow-
er’. In short, ‘constituent power . . . resists being constitutionalized’. And: ‘To speak of constituent
power is to speak of democracy. . . . constituent power has been considered not only as an all-power-
ful and expansive principle capable of producing the constitutional norms of any juridical system,
but also as the subject of this production – an activity equally all-powerful and expansive. From this
standpoint, constituent power tends to become identified with the very concept of politics as it is un-
derstood in a democratic society. To acknowledge constituent power as a constitutional and juridical
principle, we must see it not simply as producing constitutional norms and structuring constituted
powers but primarily as a subject that regulates democratic politics’. By my reading, this sketch of
constituent power is consistent with my deployment of the concept of a constitutive outside. See An-
tonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans. Maurizia Boscagli, Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, p. 1.
31 Branden W. Joseph and Paolo Virno, ‘Interview with Paolo Virno’, trans. Alessia Ricciardi, Grey Room
21 (Fall, 2005): 32, http://mitpress.mit.edu/journals/pdf/GR21_026-037_Jospeph.pdf.
32 See Neilson and Rossiter, ‘From Precarity to Precarious and Back Again’.
33 Harold A. Innis, The Bias of Communication, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951.
34 Robins and Webster, The Virtual University?, p. 5.
35 Of course the trips Agreement does not inaugurate the international approach to copyright regula-
tion and harmonization. The nineteenth century Berne Convention established the international stan-
dards to copyright to which the laws of member states must conform. As I note above, the wto’s trips
Agreement coincides with the informatization of the commodity object and labour-power, thus am-
plifying legal regimes and discourses as a biopolitical force.
36 See Simon Marginson and Mark Considine, The Enterprise University: Power, Governance and Reinven-
tion in Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000; David Noble, Digital Diploma Mills: The
Automation of Higher Education, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002; Robbins and Webster, The Vir-
tual University?; Marc Bousquet, ‘The “Informal Economy” of the Information University’, Workplace:
A Journal for Academic Labour 5.1 (2002), http://www.cust.educ.ubc.ca/workplace/issue5p1/bousquet-
informal.html.
37 See Florian Schneider’s documentary Organizing the Unorganizables (2002), downloadable at:
http://wastun.org/organizing.
38 In this regard, sociality can be understood as the empty centre of neoliberalism in so far as neoliberal-
ism disavows the social. Thatcher put this most explicitly in that much cited declaration of hers:
‘There is no such thing as society’ (and she then goes on to say that individuals and the family are
fine). In a rhetorical sense, neoliberalism has no sense of the social, and what it passes off as social –
individual relations of self-improvement, risk, responsibility, etcetera – are indeed empty. Yet we
know that it is also impossible for anything to emerge without the constituent force of social rela-
tions, and this is where sociality operates as the constituent outside of neoliberalism – structurally,
psychically, etcetera – that is going to come back and bite neoliberalism on the arse. That doesn’t nec-
essarily mean in any organized sense, but rather as a force of relations (a sociality of things in the
broad sense such as pollution, contaminated foods and environmental degradation) that coalesce
around a set of problematics expressed in terms other than neoliberalism.
39 An EU initiative since 1999 aimed at establishing uniform standards across European universities in
order to encourage the movement of students, teachers and researchers.

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 notes

40 Bologna Secretariat, http://www.dfes.gov.uk/bologna/.

41 Admissions Officers and Credential Evaluators’ (ACE) professional section of the European Associa-
tion for International Education (EAIE), http://www.aic.lv/ace/default.htm.
42 Of course NGOs and grass-roots organizations such as community networks have long histories of in-
corporation. But for some reason very few networks have done this. Thing.Net and xs4all are excep-
tions that come to mind. Yet these networks seem to have reached a plateau, and perhaps even stag-
nated, as just yet another option in the sea of ISPs to choose from, albeit with their own brand of spe-
cial attractors.
43 Projects Schneider and Lang have either initiated or participated in include Borderline Academy,
Makeworlds, Incommunicado, Was Tun?, Noborder Network, and V2V Video Syndication Network.
A full listing can be found at: http://www.kein.org/projects.
44 Gregory Bateson, ‘Form, Substance, and Difference’, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, New York: Ballan-
tine Books, 1972, p. 453. Italics in original.
45 See Tiziana Terranova, ‘Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy’, Social Text 18.2
(2000): 33-58.
46 Bousquet, ‘The “Informal Economy” of the Information University’.
47 Julian Kücklich, ‘Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry’, Fibreculture Journal 5
(2005), http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/kucklich.html.
48 World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization, A Fair Globalization: Creating Opportu-
nities for All, Geneva: International Labour Organization: 2004,
http://www.ilo.org/public/english/fairglobalization/report/index.htm.
49 oecd, Governance in the 21st Century, Paris: oecd, 2001, p. 4,
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/41/42/35391582.pdf.
50 A point made in Spehr’s contributions to Free Cooperation.
51 In fact one can simply view the history link in order to see the names and ip addresses that comprise
the distribution of labour.
52 Joseph Reagle, ‘Open Communities and Closed Law’, Open Codex weblog, 13 June, 2006, http://rea-
gle.org/joseph/blog/culture/wikipedia/open-discourse-closed-law?showcomments=yes.
53 Antonio Negri with Anne Dufourmantelle, Negri on Negri, trans. M. B. DeBevoise, London and New
York: Routledge, 2004, p. 117.
54 In this sense, a medium theory of network cultures necessarily combines both social and technical
dimensions of communication and cannot simply be reduced to notions of media as container de-
vices of communication.
55 Having said this, I am inconsistent in my use of institutional forms over institutions. This is largely a
matter of style and syntax. Where I connect institutions to networks, I am thinking of forms.
56 Manuela Bojadzijev and Isabelle Saint-Saëns, ‘Borders, Citizenship, War, Class: A Discussion with Éti-
enne Balibar and Sandro Mezzadra’, New Formations 58 (2006): 22-24.
57 Angela Mitropoulos and Brett Neilson, ‘Cutting Democracy’s Knot’, Culture Machine 8 (2006),
http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Articles/neilson.htm.
58 Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age, London: Pluto, 2004, pp. 28, 35.
59 Ibid., pp. 36-37.
60 As I write, these are all issues currently being discussed and debated on the collaborative blog Long
Sunday <http://www.long-sunday.net/long_sunday/>, with parallel thought on a range of personal
blogs, Jon Beasley-Murray’s Posthegemony <http://posthegemony.blogspot.com/> among them. See
the late July 2006 archives on these blogs.
61 Mario Tronti, La politica al tramonto, Torino: Einaudi, 1998. Thanks to Brett Neilson for assistance
with translation.
62 Jon Beasley-Murray, ‘Politics’, Posthegemony: Hegemony, Posthegemony, and Related Matters, 16
July, 2006, http://posthegemony.blogspot.com/2006/07/politics.html.
63 Cf. Beasley-Murray. Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, chapters 1 and 6.
64 Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, p. 40.

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organized networks

65 Benita Parry, ‘Internationalism Revisited or In Praise of Internationalism’, Variant 17 (2003),

http://www.variant.randomstate.org/17texts/17benitaparry.html. A much harsher critique of Empire
can be read in Timothy Brennan, ‘The Empire’s New Clothes’, Critical Inquiry 29.2 (2003): 337-367.
66 See Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights, especially chapter 7.
67 See David Harvey, ‘Globalization in Question’, Rethinking Marxism 8.4 (1995): 1-17.

Chapter 1
1 For a brief genealogy of the term social capital, see Phillip E. Agre, ‘Real-Time Politics: The Internet
and the Political Process’, The Information Society 18.5 (2002): 311-331. Also available from: http://po-
laris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/real-time.html. For an autonomist deployment of the term, see Mario Tron-
ti, ‘Social Capital’, Telos 17 (1977): 98-121.
Over the past decade, however, the term social capital is more often associated with proponents of
Third Way politics. See Anthony Gidddens, The Third Way: the Renewal of Social Democracy, Cam-
bridge: Polity Press, 1998; Mark Latham, What did you Learn Today? Creating an Education Revolution,
Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2001, pp. 62-100.
2 Gary Genosko, ‘Félix Guattari: Towards a Transdisciplinary Metamethodology’, Angelaki 8.1 (2003):
33.
3 Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, London: Verso, 2000, p. 3.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., pp. 102-103, 135.
6 Chantal Mouffe, On the Political, London and New York: Routledge, 2005.
7 Paolo Virno and Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘Multitude/working class [interview]’, trans. Arianna Bove, Mul-
titudes 9 (May-June, 2002), http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Multitude-working-class.html.
8 Not even when she is participating with political activists addressing the theme of infopolitics does
Mouffe rethink her argument on institutions, as on the occasion of the Dark Market: Infopolitics, Elec-
tronic Media and Democracy in Times of Crisis conference held at Public Netbase in Vienna, 2002. For
full documentation, including Mouffe’s paper, ‘Which Democracy in a Post-Political Age’, 2002, see
http://darkmarkets.t0.or.at.
9 Mouffe, On the Political, p. 9. See also Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, London and New York: Verso,
2005, pp. 70-71, 87.
10 See Geert Lovink, My First Recession: Critical Internet Culture in Transition, Brussels and Rotterdam:
V2/NAi Publishers, 2003, pp. 121-126.
11 http://aoir.org.
12 See Scott Lash, Critique of Information, London: Sage, 2002.
13 Mouffe, On the Political, p. 15. While there are significant differences, the constitutive outside is an op-
eration similar to what systems theorists and cyberneticists would term ‘organizational closure’ or
‘noise’, which I discuss in chapter 5.
14 Laclau, On Populist Reason, p. 241.
15 Those who entertain online systems of voting or ‘e-democracy’ believe they are transposing the cen-
tral tenets of representative liberal democracy into ‘virtual’ settings. Far from it. Such projects high-
light the evacuation of adversaries engaged in a hegemonic process, and instead embody the very
failure of representative systems to address the tensions that underscore sociality.
16 Mouffe, On the Political, p. 33.
17 See Ernesto Laclau, ‘Can Immanence Explain Social Struggles?, in Paul A. Passavant and Jodi Dean
(eds), Empire’s New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri, New York and London: Routledge, 2004, p. 27; La-
clau, On Populist Reason, pp. 240, 242. Mouffe makes a similar argument to Laclau, claiming the ‘the
constitutive character of antagonism is denied’. On the Political, p. 107.
18 See Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand, forw. Paul Bové, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1988.
19 Laclau, ‘Can Immanence Explain Social Struggles?’, p. 27.
20 Laclau, On Populist Reason, p. 245.
21 For a critique of post-political theorists, see Mouffe, On the Political, pp. 35-63.
22 Ibid., p. 95.

220
 notes

23 See Ned Rossiter, ‘Modalities of Indigenous Sovereignty, Transformations of the Nation-State, and In-
tellectual Property Regimes’, Borderlands E-Journal: New Spaces in the Humanities 1.2 (2002),
http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/issues/vol1no2.html.
24 Wolfgang Kleinwächter, ‘Civil Society and Global Diplomacy in the 21st Century: The Case of wsis or
from Input to Impact?’, February, Version 1.0, 2005.
25 For a brief outline of some of the tensions peculiar to multi-stakeholderism as the preferred model of
governance at wsis, see Stijn van der Krogt, ‘On Multi-stakeholderism’, posting to incommunicado
mailing list [sent by Geert Lovink], 27 May, 2005, http://incommunicado.info/mailinglist.
26 I recently outlined some of the alternative funding models that have been proposed in the creative
industries in the uk and the Netherlands. While I’m critical of these models, which include a financ-
ing stream heavily dependent on regulating telcos and ISPs and the expansion of collecting agencies
as intermediaries for media productions commissioned under a Creative Commons license, they
none the less are indicative of a discussion that organized networks can learn from if they are going
to have any possibility of scaling up their operations. For a video recording of my talk on ‘Creative In-
dustries, Organized Networks and Open Economies’, Kwan Fong Cultural Development and Re-
search Programme, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, 24 May, 2005, see: http://libmedia.ln.edu.hk/me-
dia3/www/lib/04-05-3/rossiter050524.htm. Abstract: http://www.ln.edu.hk/ihss/crd/cm200405.htm.
27 See Robin Blackburn, ‘The Enron Debacle and the Pension Crisis’, New Left Review 14 (2002): 26-51.
28 See Ankie Hoogvelt, Globalization and the Postcolonial World: The New Political Economy of Development,
London: Palgrave, 2001, pp. 181-182.
29 Ibid., p. 184.
30 See Simon Cooper, ‘Post Intellectuality?: Universities and the Knowledge Industry’, in Simon Cooper,
John Hinkson and Geoff Sharp (eds), Scholars and Entrepreneurs: the University in Crisis, Fitzroy: Arena
Publications, 2002, pp. 207-232; Simon Marginson and Mark Considine, The Enterprise University: Pow-
er, Governance and Reinvention in Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. See also Bri-
an Holmes, ‘The Flexible Personality’ (Parts 1 & 2), posting to nettime mailing list, 5 January, 2002,
http://www.nettime.org.
31 Mary Kaldor, Global Civil Society: An Answer to War, Cambridge: Polity, 2003.
32 Rebecca Knuth, ‘Sovereignty, Globalism and Information Flow in Complex Emergencies’, The Infor-
mation Society 15 (1999): 15.
33 See Alexander Cooley and James Ron, ‘The NGO Scramble: Organizational Insecurity and the Political
Economy of Transnational Action’, International Security 27.1 (2002): 5-39.
34 This period is covered in Geert Lovink, Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture, Cambridge, Mass.:
mit Press, 2002, pp. 115n41, 296-304. See also the nettime archives, http://www.nettime.org.
35 Geert Lovink, ‘Interview with Saskia Sassen on PGOs (for N5M3 tv)’, posting to nettime mailing list,
25 February, 1999, http://www.nettime.org.
36 Cf. Cooley and Ron, ‘The NGO Scramble: Organizational Insecurity and the Political Economy of
Transnational Action’.
37 Ghassan Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society, Annandale: Pluto
Press, 2003.
38 See Knuth, ‘Sovereignty, Globalism and Information Flow in Complex Emergencies’, pp. 15-16.
39 Martin Shaw, Theory of the Global State: Globality as an Unfinished Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000.
40 Manuel Castells, ‘Information Technology, Globalization and Social Development’, unRISD Discus-
sion Paper, no. 114, September, 1999. Available at: http://www.unrisd.org/unrisd/website/docu-
ment.nsf/(httpPublications)/F270E0C066F3DE7780256B67005B728C?OpenDocument.
41 Hoogvelt, Globalization and the Postcolonial World, p. 173. See also Heribert Dieter, ‘World Economy:
Structures and Trends’, in P. Kennedy, D. Messner and F. Nuscheler (eds), Global Trends and Global
Governance, London: Pluto Press and Development and Peace Foundation, 2002, p. 69.
42 Paul Blustein, ‘imf Medicine: the Right Cure?’, International Herald Tribune 27 September, 2002, p. 9.
43 David and Foray, ‘An Introduction to the Economy of the Knowledge Society’, International Social Sci-
ence Journal 171 (2002): 9.
44 Ibid, p. 10.

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organized networks

45 See Christopher May, The Information Society: A Sceptical View, Cambridge: Polity, 2002, p. 130. Ted By-
field makes this point in quite different ways: ‘. . . systems of property are a by-product of the state. ex-
tending such a system necessarily involves extending and/or deepening the reach of the state’. Re-
sponse to the Intellectual Property Regimes and Indigenous Sovereignty thread on nettime, 27
March, 2002, http://www.nettime.org. Byfield sees this as a negative development, though I think
that depends entirely upon one’s economic, social-political and geographic situation.
46 Ibid, p. 141.
47 Castells, ‘Information Technology, Globalization and Social Development’, p. 16.
48 Rossiter, ‘Modalities of Indigenous Sovereignty, Transformations of the Nation-State, and Intellectual
Property Regimes’.
49 See Christine Morris and Michael Meadows, ‘Indigenising Intellectual Property’, Griffith Law Review
9.2 (2000): 212-226.
50 Comment made during a panel discussion at the Dark Market: Infopolitics, Electronic Media and Democ-
racy in Times of Crisis conference held at Public Netbase in Vienna, 2002, http://darkmarkets.t0.or.at.

Chapter 2
1 See Ankie Hoogvelt, Globalization and the Postcolonial World: The New Political Economy of Development,
London: Palgrave, 2001, p. 176.
2 Mary Kaldor, Global Civil Society: An Answer to War, Cambridge: Polity, 2003, p. 32.
3 Ibid., pp. 31-32.
4 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, New York: Pen-
guin Press, 2004, p. 6.
5 Michael Hardt, ‘The Withering of Civil Society’, Social Text 14.4 (1995): 40.
6 Although the so-called ‘decline’ of state sovereignty and non-state institutions is peculiar to a mod-
ern era of sovereignty. I maintain that state sovereignty has transformed rather than disappeared.
Similarly, the role of non-state institutions can be considered in terms of emergent civil society
movements.
7 In his biographical and biopolitical abecedary undertaken in collaboration with Anne Dufourman-
telle, Negri defines ‘Empire’ even more precisely as: ‘The transfer of sovereignty of nation-states to a
higher entity’. Antonio Negri with Anne Dufourmantelle, Negri on Negri, trans. M. B. DeBevoise, Lon-
don and New York: Routledge, 2004, p. 59.
8 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000, pp. 328-
329.
9 See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of
Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1989.
10 See Kaldor, Global Civil Society, pp. 15-49.
11 Raymond Williams, ‘Dominant, Residual and Emergent’, in Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1977, pp. 121-127.
12 Mark Surman and Katherine Reilly, Appropriating the Internet for Social Change: Towards the Strategic
Use of Networked Technologies by Transnational Civil Society Organizations, version 1.0, New York: Social
Science Research Council, 2003. Available at http://www.ssrc.org/programs/itic/.
13 Mark Surman and Katherine Reilly, Executive Summary. Appropriating the Internet for Social Change: To-
wards the Strategic Use of Networked Technologies by Transnational Civil Society Organizations, version
1.0, New York: Social Science Research Council, 2003, p. 3. Available at http://www.ssrc.org/pro-
grams/itic/.
14 When I speak of scale throughout this chapter, I am referring to the capacity of actors to operate
across a range of levels of governance and practice. Different scales or spatialities of operation in-
clude, for example, supranational, national, transnational, translocal, and intraregional layers of rela-
tions.
15 For background information and critical reports on the wsis, see http://www.itu.int/wsis,
http://www.wsis-online.org, http://www.unicttaskforce.org, http://www.apc.org, http://www.ssrc.org,
http://www.southcentre.org. See also reports and debates on nettime <http://www.nettime.org> and
incommunicado <http://www.incommunicado.info>. See also Valeria Betancourt, The World Summit

222
 notes

on the Information Society (WSIS): Process and Issues Debated, Association for Progressive Communica-
tions (apc), 2004, http://www.apc.org.
16 See William J. Drake (ed.), Reforming Internet Governance: Perspectives from the Working Group on Inter-
net Governance (wgig), New York: United Nations ICT Task Force, 2005. Available at:
http://www.wgig.org/docs/book/wgig_book.pdf. See also Danny Butt (ed.), Internet Governance: Asia-
Pacific Perspectives, New Dehli: Elsevier and undp Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme,
2005. Available at: http://www.apdip.net/publications/ict4d/igovperspectives.pdf.
17 wsis Plan of Action, Geneva, 12 December, 2003, http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-
s/md/03/WSIS/doc/S03-WSIS-DOC-0005!!PDF.pdf.
18 Sasha Costanza-Chock, ‘wsis, the Neoliberal Agenda, and Counter-proposals from ‘Civil Society’, post-
ing [by Geert Lovink] to nettime mailing list, 12 July, 2003, http://www.nettime.org.
19 Yoshio Utsumi, Secretary-General of the itu, cited in Constanza-Chock, 2003.
20 Steve Cisler, ‘icann or un?’, posting to nettime mailing list, 12 December, 2003,
http://www.nettime.org.
21 http://www.icann.org/general.
22 See Adam Peake, Internet Governance and the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), Association
for Progressive Communications, 2004, p. 9, http://rights.apc.org/documents/governance.pdf.
23 See Alexander Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, Cambridge, Mass.: mit
Press, 2004.
24 Peake, Internet Governance and the World Summit on the Information Society.
25 The kind of regionalism constituted by the cloning of root servers raises another interesting issue:
namely, the geography of power that attends the complex multilayered dimensions of competing ‘re-
gionalisms’. How, for example, does the informational regionalism of the Anycast system reproduce
or contest more established regional formations of transnational cultural flows and the diaspora of
labour-power, or the regionalisms of multilateral trade agreements and economic blocs, or the subna-
tional, intraregional formations of civil society movements?
26 Peake notes that ‘The request of the wsis Plan of Action to deploy ‘regional root servers’ was achieved
even before the Summit was held’ (10). The question remains as to whether this plan is put into ef-
fect – something that is still far from certain after the 2005 Summit.
27 Ibid, p. 10.
28 See Carlos M. Correa and Sisule F. Musungu, The wipo Patent Agenda: The Risks for Developing Countries,
Trade Related Agenda, Development and Equity (T.R.A.D.E.), Working Papers, no. 12, South Centre,
2002, http://www.southcentre.org/publications/wipopatent/wipopatent.pdf.
29 Carlos M. Correa, The wipo Draft Substantive Patent Law Treaty: A Review of Selected Provision, Working
Papers, no. 17, South Centre, 2004, p. 9, http://www.southcentre.org/publications/workingpapers/pa-
per17/wp17.pdf.
30 Civil Society Declaration to the World Summit on the Information Society, Shaping Information Soci-
eties for Human Needs, wsis Civil Society Plenary, Geneva, 2003,
http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs/geneva/civil-society-declaration.pdf.
31 Peake, cited in Ted Byfield, ‘cctlds, wsis, itu, icann, ETC’, posting to nettime mailing list, 7 March,
2003, http://www.nettime.org.
32 Byfield, ‘cctlds, wsis, itu, icann, ETC’.
33 See wsis Declaration of Principles, Geneva, 12 December, 2003, http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-
s/md/03/wsis/doc/S03-WSIS-DOC-0004!!PDF-E.pdf; wsis Plan of Action, 2003.
34 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘The Différend, the Referent, and the Proper Name’, trans. Georges Van Den
Abbeele, Diacritics 14.3 (1984): 4-14; Jean-François Lyotard, The Différend: Phrases in Dispute, trans.
Georges Van Den Abbeele, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
35 John Palfrey, ‘The End of the Experiment: How Icann’s Foray into Global Internet Democracy Failed’,
Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 17 (2004): 411-412.
36 Daniel Bensaid, ‘Sovereignty, Nation, Empire’, trans. Isabel Brenner, Kathryn Dykstra, Penny Oliver
and Tracey Williams, in William F. Fisher and Thomas Ponniah (eds), Another World Is Possible: Popu-
lar Alternatives to Globalization at the World Social Forum, London and New York: Zed Books, 2003, p.
317.

223
organized networks

37 Palfrey, ‘The End of the Experiment: How Icann’s Foray into Global Internet Democracy Failed’, p.
412.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid., pp. 412-413.
40 For an argument of how intellectual property regimes hold the potential to advance indigenous sov-
ereignty movements in Australia, see Rossiter, ‘Modalities of Indigenous Sovereignty, Transforma-
tions of the Nation-State, and Intellectual Property Regimes’.
41 See Thomas Frank, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic
Democracy, New York: Anchor Books, 2000; Doug Henwood, After the New Economy, New York: The
New Press, 2003; Geert Lovink, My First Recession: Critical Internet Culture in Transition, Rotterdam:
V2/NAi Publishers, 2003, pp. 56-85.
42 Geert Lovink and Jeanette Hofmann, ’Open Ends: Civil Society and Internet Governance [Interview]’,
posting to nettime mailing list, 12 August, 2004, http://www.nettime.org.
43 http://www.apc.org/english/index.shtml.
44 See Claudia Padovani and Arjunna Tuzzi, Global Civil Society and the World Summit on the Information
Society: Reflections on Global Governance, Participation and the Changing Scope of Political Action, Social Sci-
ence Research Council, New York, 2004, http://www.sscr.org/programs/itic/publications/knowedge-
report/memos/padovani3-4-30-04.pdf.
45 See Lovink, My First Recession, pp. 57-85.
46 Padovani and Tuzzi, Global Civil Society and the World Summit on the Information Society.
47 See Betancourt, The World Summit on the Information Society.
48 See Hans Klein, Understanding WSIS: An Institutional Analysis of the un World Summit on the Information
Society, Internet & Public Policy Project, School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology,
2003, p. 3, http://IP3.gatech.edu.
49 My comments in this paragraph and the next are adapted in Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter, ‘Dawn of
the Organised Networks’, Fibreculture Journal 5 (2005),
http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/lovink_rossiter.html.

Chapter 3
1 Norbert Bolz, ‘Rethinking Media Aesthetics’, in Geert Lovink, Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the
Virtual Intelligentsia, Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 2000, p. 19.
2 Lovink, Uncanny Networks, p. 4.
3 McKenzie Wark, ‘The Power of Multiplicity and the Multiplicity of Power’, in Lovink, Uncanny Net-
works, p. 316.
4 Scott Lash, Critique of Information, London: Sage, 2002, p. 220.
5 Or perhaps, more correctly after Baudrillard, a globalization of media culture and information flows,
since universality, for Baudrillard, is homologous with ethical principles such as human rights,
whereas globalization is a term that has emerged with the advent of new ICTs, post-1989 world events,
and the re-scaling of capital. One does not speak of ‘global’ human rights, for example. Rather human
rights are a set of principles that may be idealized, and rarely adhered to. Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Vio-
lence of the Global’, trans. François Debrix, Ctheory, a129, May, 2003,
http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=385.
6 Lash, Critique of Information, p. 8.
7 Ibid., p. 9. See also Andreas Wittel, ‘Toward a Network Sociality’, Theory, Culture & Society 18.6 (2001):
51-76.
8 Ibid., p. 10.
9 Ibid.
10 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, London: Routledge, 1990, p. 4.
11 Or as Kafka elegantly deduced: ‘Capitalism is a system of relationships, which go from inside to out,
from outside to in, from above to below, and from below to above. Everything is relative, everything
is in chains. Capitalism is a condition both of the world and of the soul’. Cited in Nicholas Thoburn,
Deleuze, Marx and Politics, London: Routledge, 2003, p. 69.

224
 notes

12 Danny Butt and Ned Rossiter, ‘Blowing Bubbles: Post-Crash Creative Industries and the Withering of
Political Critique in Cultural Studies’, paper presented at Ute Culture: The Utility of Culture and the Uses
of Cultural Studies, Cultural Studies Association of Australia Conference, Melbourne, 5-7 December,
2002. Posted to fibreculture mailing list, 10 December, 2002, http://www.fibreculture.org.
13 Here I am appropriating a phrase by Susan Buck-Morss, who is referring to a Derridean sense of the
constitutive outside as it operates within secular Islamic discourse in Turkey. Susan Buck-Morss,
Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left, London and New York: Verso, 2003, p. 45.
14 At least one of the key proponents of the creative industries in Australia is ready to acknowledge this.
See Stuart Cunningham, ‘The Evolving Creative Industries: From Original Assumptions to Contem-
porary Interpretations’, seminar paper, qut, Brisbane, 9 May, 2003,
http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00004391/01/4391.pdf.
15 Creative Industry Task Force: Mapping Document, dcms (Department of Culture, Media and Sport)
(1998/2001), London,
http://www.culture.gov.uk/global/publications/archive_2001/ci_mapping_doc_2001.htm?proper-
ties=archive%5F2001%2C%2Fcreative%5Findustries%2FQuickLinks%2Fpublications%2Fde-
fault%2C&month=.
16 My claims here are valid for the period in which this chapter was written (2003/2004). Fortunately
this situation has changed since then, with a considerable amount of research now being undertaken
on the relation between intellectual property and creative industries. See, for example, Terry Flew
(ed.), Media & Arts Law Review, Special Issue: Creative Commons and the Creative Industries 10.4
(2005), http://www.law.unimelb.edu.au/cmcl/malr/contents104.html. See also Terry Flew, New Me-
dia: An Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 154-159. Though even here there is no
attempt to identify the implications iprs hold for those working in the creative industries sectors.
Michael Keane has a body of important work investigating intellectual property issues in China. See
Michael Keane, Created in China: the Great New Leap Forward, London: RoutledgeCurzon, forthcoming
2007.
17 See Angela McRobbie, ‘Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decline of Political Culture in Speeded up
Creative Worlds’, Cultural Studies 16.4 (2002): 516-531. See also Andrew Ross, No-Collar: The Humane
Workplace and Its Hidden Costs, New York: Basic Books, 2003.
18 Thomas Frank, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic
Democracy, New York: Anchor Books, 2000.
19 See Andrew McNamara, ‘How “Creative Industries” Evokes the Legacy of Modernist Visual Art’, Me-
dia International Australia 102 (2002): 66-76.
20 Mathew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960, p. 6.
21 See Graeme Turner, British Cultural Studies: An Introduction, Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990, pp. 41-84;
Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, London and New York: Routledge, 1995,
pp. 87-101; Patrick Brantlinger, Crusoe’s Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America, New York
and London: Routledge, 1990, pp. 34-67. As one would expect from the ‘internationalization’ of Cul-
tural Studies, counter-readings of the emergence of cultural studies within Britain, and the signifi-
cance it holds for local contexts, are inevitable. Interesting work on this topic from a younger genera-
tion of scholars writing from an Australian perspective includes McKenzie Wark, ‘Speaking Trajecto-
ries: Meaghan Morris, Antipodean Theory and Australian Cultural Studies’, Cultural Studies 6.3
(1992): 433-448; Terry Flew, ‘Cultural Materialism and Cultural Policy: Reassessing Raymond
Williams’, Social Semiotics 7.1 (1997): 5-19; Mark Gibson, ‘Richard Hoggart’s Grandmother’s Ironing:
Some Questions about “Power” in International Cultural Studies’, International Journal of Cultural
Studies 1.1 (1998): 25-44; Mark Gibson, ‘The Temporality of Democracy: The Long Revolution and Di-
ana, Princess of Wales’, New Formations 36 (1999): 59-76; Mark Gibson, ‘The Geography of Theory:
Channel Crossings, Continental Invasions and the Anglo-American “Natives”’, symploke 11.1/2 (2003):
152-166; Tania Lewis, ‘Intellectual Exchange and Located Transnationalism: Meaghan Morris and the
Formation of Australian Cultural Studies’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 17.2 (2003):
187-206; Tania Lewis, ‘Stuart Hall and the Formation of British Cultural Studies: A Diasporic Narra-
tive’, Imperium IV (2004), http://www.imperiumjournal.com/index.html; Melissa Gregg, ‘A Neglected

225
organized networks

History: Richard Hoggart’s Discourse of Empathy’, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice
7.3 (2003): 285-306; Melissa Gregg, Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006.
22 And in this respect, it is possible to draw a parallel between the creative industries project within
Queensland and its institutional predecessor, the Australian Key Centre for Cultural and Media Poli-
cy, directed by Tony Bennett. For a critique of the tendency by advocates of cultural policy studies –
particularly Bennett – to read Foucauldian ‘governmentality’ as a variation of Althusserian ‘ISAs’, see
Helen Grace, ‘Eating the Curate’s Egg: Cultural Studies for the Nineties’, West 3.1 (1991): 46-49. Inter-
estingly enough, McKenzie Wark adopts the position of an ‘outsider intellectual’ in his critique of
Bennett and cultural policy studies. See McKenzie Wark, ‘After Literature: Culture, Policy, Theory
and Beyond’, Meanjin 5.4 (1992): 677-690.
23 See Geert Lovink, Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture, Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 2002; Geert
Lovink, My First Recession: Critical Internet Culture in Transition, Rotterdam: V2/NAi, 2003; Graham
Meikle, Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet, Sydney: Pluto Press, 2002.
24 See Shujen Wang and Jonathan J. H. Zhu, ‘Mapping Film Piracy in China’, Theory, Culture & Society
20.4 (2003): 97-125.
25 Scott McQuire, ‘When is Art it?’, in Hugh Brown, Geert Lovink, Helen Merrick, Ned Rossiter, David
Teh, Michele Willson (eds), Politics of a Digital Present: An Inventory of Australian Net Culture, Criticism
and Theory, Melbourne: Fibreculture Publications, 2001, p. 209.
A qut report commissioned by the Brisbane City Council in 2003 provides some illuminating statis-
tics on the varying concentrations of workers in the Creative Industries across Australia. There aren’t
too many surprises. Of the seven capital cities in Australia in 2001, Sydney holds the highest propor-
tion of creative industry workers (90,600/40.1%). Melbourne has 63,453 (28.1%), Brisbane
(25,324/11.2%), Perth (21,211/9.4%), Adelaide (15,345/6.8%), Canberra (6,916/3.1%), and the Greater
Hobart Area (3,055/1.3%). See Stuart Cunningham, Gregory Hearn, Stephen Cox, Abraham Ninan
and Michael Keane, Brisbane’s Creative Industries 2003, Report delivered to Brisbane City Council,
Community and Economic Development, Brisbane: CIRAC, 2003,
http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00002409/01/2409_2.pdf.
26 See Stuart Cunningham, ‘Culture, Services, Knowledge or Is Content King, or are we just Drama
Queens?’, Communications Research Forum, Canberra, 2-3 October, 2002,
http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00000202/01/cunningham_culture.pdf.
27 See McQuire, ‘When is Art it?’, p. 10.
28 Creative Industries Faculty, qut, http://www.creativeindustries.qut.com. A number of research pa-
pers and reports can be found at: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/view/subjects/fac_ci.html.
29 Barcan is referring here to the accusation by Australian Prime Minister John Howard regarding ‘the
idleness of so many in academia’. Barcan is contesting the widespread perception that ‘useful’ teach-
ing is vocationally oriented and ‘useful’ research has outcomes with commercial application. See
Ruth Barcan, ‘The Idleness of Academics: Reflections on the Usefulness of Cultural Studies’, Continu-
um: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 4.4 (2003): 363-378.
30 See Simon Marginson and Mark Considine, The Enterprise University: Power, Governance and Reinven-
tion in Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
31 John Hartley and Stuart Cunningham, ‘Creative Industries: from Blue Poles to fat pipes’, in Malcolm
Gillies (ed.), The National Humanities and Social Sciences Summit: Position Papers, Canberra: DEST, 2002.
Available at: http://www.dest.gov.au/NR/rdonlyres/C785B22C-E7EC-47D0-9781-
C5AA68546FCD/1426/summit701.pdf.
32 See Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. M. Ritter, London: Sage, 1992; Zygmunt
Bauman, The Individualized Society, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001; McRobbie, ‘Clubs to Companies’.
33 Sue Williams, ‘$A the Villain in Screen Drama’, The Australian Financial Review, 12 December, 2003, p.
20.
34 Ibid.
35 Chris Chesher, ‘fta and new media?’, posting to fibreculture mailing list, 20 January, 2004,
http://www.fibreculture.org. For an informative study of free trade agreements between the usa and
Australia, and their effect on Australia’s cultural economies, see Jock Given, America’s Pie: Trade and
Culture After 9/11, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2003.

226
 notes

36 See Robert Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble: The us in the World Economy, London and New York: Ver-
so, 2002; Jean Gadrey, New Economy, New Myth, London and New York: Routledge, 2003; Geert
Lovink, ‘After the Dotcom Crash: Recent Literature on Internet, Business and Society’, Australian Hu-
manities Review 27 (September-December, 2002), http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-
September-2002/lovink.html; Adam Tickell, ‘Unstable Futures: Controlling and Creating Risks in In-
ternational Money’, in Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (eds), Global Capitalism versus Democracy: Socialist
Register, 1999, Suffolk: Merlin, 1999, pp. 248-277.
37 Lash, Critique of Information, p. 24.
38 As Esther Milne has pointed out to me, in many cases practitioners own their own copyright. Fur-
thermore, practitioners are situated differently in relation to intellectual property: a scriptwriter, for
instance, holds a relation to ip in a way that a camera person does not. However, the principle of ex-
clusion still holds in such instances: irrespective of whether or not one’s labour is ascribed potential
value as intellectual property, the point is that labour value is determined by its relation to intellectu-
al property rights. In other words, living labour is reduced to labour-power circumscribed within the
legal regime of property, and holds no other value other than property or not worthy of property. In
which case labour is no more than a service to be traded on the market.
39 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt, Minneapolis: University of Minneso-
ta Press, 1993, p. 68.
40 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill,
New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 35.
41 Ibid., pp. 36-39.
42 Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, London: Verso, 2000, p. 12. Mouffe acknowledges that she is
drawing on the work of Derrida for her understanding of a constitutive outside. I am taking quite a
different route to an understanding of a constitutive outside by engaging the work of Deleuze, who
defines the relationship between inside and outside in terms of the ‘fold’ and a Foucauldian diagram
of power.
43 Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror, p. 94.
44 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 97.
45 Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frank-
furt Institute, New York: Free Press, 1977, p. 154.
46 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 145.
47 Ibid., p. 182.
48 See Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics, p. 249; Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity
and Avant-Garde, London: Verso, 1995, pp. 133-159.
49 Or what Adorno called Benjamin’s radical ‘negative theology’. See Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of
Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1989, p. 244.
50 Ibid., pp. 218, 246.
51 Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics.
52 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 16.
53 Karl Marx, ‘Excerpt from A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’, in Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. Lewis S. Feuer, New York: Doubleday, 1959, p. 44.
54 Here, I am referring to the 2001 federal election in Australia, which was notable for the conspicuous
and cynical campaign of fear run by the incumbent government, John Howard’s conservative coali-
tion party. Howard played a central role in exploiting a media-generated fear that fed upon the
events of September 11 and ‘illegal’ refugees, many of whom were Afghani asylum seekers arriving
in Australian territorial waters, fleeing the ravages of war and political persecution. Many have put
Howard’s success in gaining a third term in office down to his ability to construct a media-facilitated
discourse in which the ‘security’ of an Australian way of life depended on the capacity of a powerful
state to determine which ‘outsiders’ would be allowed to become ‘one of us’. Articulating terrorists
with asylum seekers worked as a key strategy in constructing this discourse of fear of the ‘outside’.
55 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press,
1995, pp. 148-149. See also Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 1994, p. 37.

227
organized networks

56 See Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. Con-
stantin V. Boundas, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991; Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Di-
alogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, Barbara Habberjam and Elliot Ross Albert, London and New York:
Continuum, 2002, p. 133. A helpful elaboration of immanent and transcendent traditions in the his-
tory of philosophy – with a specific focus on contemporary French philosophy – can be found in
Daniel W. Smith, ‘Deleuze and Derrida, Immanence and Transcendence: Two Directions in Recent
French Thought’, in Paul Patton and John Protevi (eds), Between Deleuze and Derrida, London and New
York: Continuum, 2003, pp. 46-66.
57 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, pp. 40-41; Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 146.
58 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 40.
59 Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, trans. Anna Boyman, intro. John Rajchman, New
York: Zone Books, 2001, p. 31.
60 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 36.
61 It is ugly, for sure, to adopt parentheses within a word to signal the dual meaning of a term. Here I am
following Massumi’s technique of translation in A Thousand Plateaus for signalling both of the words,
‘plan’ and ‘plane’. In a translator’s note to Deleuze’s Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Robert Hurley makes
the following useful clarification: ‘The French word plan . . . covers virtually all the meanings of the
English “plan” and “plane”. To preserve the major contrast that Deleuze sets up here, between plan
d’immanence ou de consistance and plan de transcendance ou d’organisation, I have used ‘plane’ for the first
term, where the meaning is, roughly, a conceptual-affective continuum, and ‘plan’ for the second
term. The reader should also keep in mind that ‘plan’ has the meaning of ‘map’ in English as well’.
See Hurley, translator’s note in Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley, San
Francisco: City Lights, 1988, p. 123.
In light of this distinction, it might seem more appropriate to adopt Hurley’s strategy and use the
word ‘plane’ where referring ‘to the plane of immanence’, and the word plan, where referring to ‘the
plan of organization’. However, I will make occasional use of the combinatory form of the two words
– plan(e) – rather than deploy them separately, since one does not necessarily preclude the operation
of the other; rather, there are complex interleavings, overlaps, and foldings between the plane and
the plan. And as Deleuze and Guattari note, there is a ‘hidden principle’ and ‘hidden structure’ within
the plan(e) that ‘exists only in a supplementary dimension to that to which it gives rise (n + 1). . . . It is
a plan(e) of transcendence. It is a plan(e) of analogy. . . . It is always inferred. Even if it is said to be imma-
nent, it is so only by the absence, analogically (metaphorically, metonymically, etc.)’. See Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, pp. 265-266. Emphasis in original.
It is in this sense in which the plane of immanence subsists, albeit as a supplementary dimension,
within that which has emerged as the plan or grid of organization that it remains useful to retain the
double sense of the French word plan. I will detail this complex relation by way of example below,
when I return to the operation of an outside within the discourse of creative industries, as espoused
by the citf and others that adopt their terms of reference.
62 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 266.
63 Deleuze, Dialogues II, p. 130.
64 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 507.
65 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham and London: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2002, p. 69.
66 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 50.
67 Agamben, The Coming Community, p. 233.
68 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p. 76.
69 Danny Butt, email correspondence, 23 January, 2004.
70 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand, forw. Paul Bové, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1988, p. 43.
71 Ibid., p. 70.
72 Ibid., p. 43.

228
 notes

73 William Rasch, Niklas Luhmann’s Modernity: The Paradoxes of Differentiation, Stanford, Cal.: Stanford
University Press, 2000, p. 106.
74 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan
Smith, New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.
75 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 79.
76 Ibid., p. 119.
77 Ibid. See also Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 98.
78 Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 98. See also Ian Angus, ‘The Materiality of Expression: Harold Innis’ Commu-
nication Theory and the Discursive Turn in the Human Sciences’, Canadian Journal of Communication
23.1 (1998): 26-27.
79 Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror, p. 93.
80 See Rosalind Gill, ‘Cool, Creative and Egalitarian? Exploring Gender in Project-based New Media
Work in Europe’, Information, Communication & Society 5.1 (2002): 70-89.
81 Ian Angus, ‘The Politics of Common Sense: Articulation Theory and Critical Communication Stud-
ies’, Communication Yearbook 15 (1992): 536.
82 The Innis centenary in 1994 was cause for a revival of interest in the wide-ranging work of Innis, al-
though this was largely a Canadian phenomenon as far as the field of media and communications
goes. A special issue of Continuum on Innis and dependency theory edited by Ian Angus and Brian
Shoesmith is one of the few attempts, to my knowledge, to situate the relevance of Innis’s work be-
yond an exclusively Canadian focus. See Ian Angus and Brian Shoesmith (eds),
‘Dependency/Space/Policy: A Dialogue with Harold A. Innis’, Special Issue, Continuum: The Australian
Journal of Media & Culture 7.1 (1993). Also available at: http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/Readin-
gRoom/continuum2.html.
Other notable works include Judith Stamps, Unthinking Modernity: Innis, McLuhan and the Frankfurt
School, Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995; Charles R. Acland and William J.
Buxton (eds), Harold Innis in the New Century: Reflections and Refractions, Montreal & Kingston: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 1999; Daniel Drache, ‘Introduction: Celebrating Innis: The Man, the Legacy,
and Our Future’, in Harold A. Innis, Staples, Markets, and Cultural Change, ed. Daniel Drache, Montreal
& Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995, pp. xiii-lix. James W. Carey, ‘Space, Time, and
Communications: A Tribute to Harold Innis’, in Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society,
New York: Routledge, 1992, pp. 142-172; Jody Berland, ‘Space at the Margins: Colonial Spatiality and
Critical Theory After Innis’, Topia: A Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 1 (1997): 55-82. For an inter-
esting example of the migration of Innis into the field of international relations, see Ronald J. Deib-
ert, ‘Harold Innis and the Empire of Speed’, Review of International Studies 25 (1999): 273-289.
83 Ian Angus, ‘Orality in the Twilight of Humanism: A Critique of the Communication Theory of
Harold Innis’, Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture 7.1 (1993): 31.
84 Ibid., pp. 28-29.
85 Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951.
86 Harold Innis, Empire and Communications, Victoria and Toronto: Press Porcépic, 1986, p. 166.
87 Ian Angus and Brian Shoesmith, ‘Dependency/Space/Policy: An Introduction to a Dialogue with
Harold Innis’, Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture 7.1 (1993): 7.
88 Ibid., p. 13.
89 Angus, ‘Orality in the Twilight of Humanism’, p. 31.
90 Stamps, Unthinking Modernity, p. 85.
91 Jody Berland, ‘Nationalism and the Modernist Legacy: Dialogues with Innis’, Culture & Policy 8.3
(1997): 31.
92 Stamps, Unthinking Modernity, p. 80.
93 Innis, The Bias of Communication, pp. 33-34.
94 Ibid., p. 33.
95 Ibid., p. 90.
96 See Innis, Empire and Communications, pp. 27-31, 36-39; The Bias of Communication, pp. 38, 98.
97 Innis, Empire and Communications, pp. 34-35, 41.
98 Innis, The Bias of Communication, p. 104.

229
organized networks

99 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 268.

100 Innis, Empire and Communications, p. 36.
101 Angus, ‘The Materiality of Expression’, p. 26.
102 Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, p. 107.
103 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 182.
104 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 89.
105 Angus, ‘The Materiality of Expression’, p. 19.

Chapter 4
1 Fibrepower: Currents in Australasian Internet Research and Culture, Fibreculture Meeting, Brisbane Pow-
erhouse, 11-13 July, 2003, http://www.fibreculture.org/conferences/conference2003/index.html. I
posted the questionnaire and preamble to the fibreculture mailing list, 29 June, 2003, http://www.fi-
breculture.org.
2 See Angela McRobbie, ‘Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decline of Political Culture in Speeded up
Creative Worlds’, Cultural Studies 16.4 (2002): 516-531. See also Rosalind Gill, ‘Cool, Creative and Egal-
itarian? Exploring Gender in Project-based New Media Work in Europe’, Information, Communication
& Society 5.1 (2002): 70-89.
3 See Terry Flew, ‘The “New Empirics” in Internet Studies and Comparative Internet Policy’, in Hugh
Brown, Geert Lovink, Helen Merrick, Ned Rossiter, David Teh, Michele Willson (eds), Politics of a Digi-
tal Present: An Inventory of Australian Net Culture, Criticism and Theory, Melbourne: Fibreculture Publi-
cations, 2001, pp. 105-113.
4 Creative Industry Task Force: Mapping Document, dcms (Department of Culture, Media and Sport)
(1998/2001), London,
http://www.culture.gov.uk/global/publications/archive_2001/ci_mapping_doc_2001.htm?proper-
ties=archive%5F2001%2C%2Fcreative%5Findustries%2FQuickLinks%2Fpublications%2Fde-
fault%2C&month=.
5 Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and
Everyday Life, New York: Basic Books, 2002, p. 8.
6 Florida does go on to discuss ip, but not in terms of how its exploitation defines creative industries, as
the citf Mapping Documents of 1998/2001 have it.
7 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Public Opinion Does Not Exist (1973)’, trans. Mary C. Axtmann in Armand Matte-
lart and Seth Siegelaub (eds), Communication and Class Struggle, Vol. 1: Capitalism, Imperialism, New
York: International General, 1979, pp. 124-130.
8 Scott Lash, ‘Reflexivity as Non-Linearity’, Theory, Culture & Society 20.2 (2003): 51.
9 Ibid., pp. 49-50.
10 My quarrel here is not with Deleuze’s concept of a logic of immanence but rather with Lash’s short-
hand version of it, which conveniently elides the conceptual – and ultimately political and ethical –
nuisance of thinking through the operation of the constitutive outside within a logic of immanence.
See in particular, Scott Lash, Critique of Information, London: Sage, 2002.
11 Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992, pp. 68-69.
12 Of course other media do this as well – books, films, tv ads, oral histories, radio interviews – though
in ways specific to their material forms, technical features, socio-cultural situations, etcetera.
13 McRobbie, ‘Clubs to Companies’, p. 519. See also Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity,
trans. M. Ritter, London: Sage, 1992, pp. 127-150; Zygmunt Bauman, The Individualized Society, Cam-
bridge: Polity Press, 2001, pp. 17-30.
14 McRobbie, ‘Clubs to Companies’, p. 518.
15 See Ankie Hoogvelt, Globalization and the Postcolonial World: The New Political Economy of Development,
London: Palgrave, 2001.
16 See Michael Hardt, ‘Introduction: Laboratory Italy’, in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (eds), Radical
Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, p. 6. See also
Paolo Virno, ‘Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus’, trans. Ed Emory, Radical
Thought in Italy, pp. 196-197.

230
 notes

17 See Ned Rossiter, ‘Modalities of Indigenous Sovereignty, Transformations of the Nation-State, and In-
tellectual Property Regimes’, Borderlands E-Journal: New Spaces in the Humanities 1.2 (2002),
http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/issues/vol1no2.html.
18 Manuel Castells and Martin Ince, Conversations with Manuel Castells, Cambridge: Polity, 2003, p. 29.
19 Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies of Signs and Space, London: Sage, 1994.
20 Ulrich Beck, What is Globalization?, trans. Patrick Camiller, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000, p. 150.
21 Richard Caves, Creative Industries: Contracts Between Art and Commerce, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2000, p. 133.
22 Ibid., p. 132.
23 Thanks to Hugh Brown for bringing the details of this case to my attention. A comprehensive ac-
count and documentation of this case can be found at: National Writer’s Union (nwu), New York
Times v Tasini, 2000, http://www.nwu.org/nwu/. See also New York Times v Tasini, 533 us 483 (2001).
24 See John Frow, ‘Information as Gift and Commodity’, New Left Review 219 (1996): 89-108.
25 Cited in Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism,
London: Pluto, 2002, p. 84.
26 See Wright, Storming Heaven, pp. 84-85. See also Yann Moulier-Boutang and Stanley Grelet, ‘The Art
of Flight: An Interview’, Interactivist Info Exchange: Independent Media & Analysis, 7 February, 2003,
http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=03/02/07/1350202.
27 Paolo Virno, ‘The Ambivalence of Disenchantment’, trans. Michael Turits, Radical Thought in Italy, p.
20. See also Mario Tronti, ‘The Strategy of Refusal’, trans. Red Notes, in Sylvère Lotringer and Christ-
ian Marazzi (eds), Italy: Autonomia, Post-Political Politics, New York: Semiotext(e), 1980, pp. 28-35. A
longer version of this essay is available at: http://www.libcom.org/library/strategy-refusal-mario-tron-
ti.
28 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.
29 Virno, ‘Virtuosity and Revolution’, p. 200. See also Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, trans.
James Cascaito Isabella Bertoletti, and Andrea Casson, forward by Sylvère Lotringer, New York: Semi-
otext(e), 2004, p. 23.
30 Virno, ‘Virtuosity and Revolution’, p. 201.
31 Antonio Negri, ‘Public Sphere, Labour and Multitude’, trans. Arianna Bove, MakeWorld Paper 3
(2003): 4. My emphasis. Also available at: http://www.makeworlds.org/?q=node/view/11. Initially I
read Negri’s intervention as belonging to the genre of the manifesto. But as the transcriber and trans-
lator, Arianna Bove, informed me: ‘Maybe it sounds like a manifesto because it was an oral interven-
tion, the context being one where in my view Negri was questioning the idea of a “public sphere”
which Virno seems to hold onto, albeit in a modified form, in some of his writings’. Email correspon-
dence, 29 September, 2003. Negri’s intervention took place in a seminar called ‘Public Sphere, labour,
multitude: Strategies of resistance in Empire’, organized by Officine Precarie in Pisa, with Toni Negri
and Paolo Virno, coordinated by Marco Bascetta, 5 February, 2003. The version that appeared in
MakeWorld #3 is slightly edited, and the word-by-word transcript (with part of Virno’s response) is
translated here: http://www.generation-online.org/t/common.htm.
32 Andreas Wittel, ‘Toward a Network Sociality’, Theory, Culture & Society 18.6 (2001): 51.
33 The notion of cooperation is related to the other autonomist key concepts of the ‘general intellect’
and ‘mass intellectuality’. See Paolo Virno, ‘Notes on the “General Intellect”’, trans. Cesare Casarino
in Marxism Beyond Marxism, eds Sareee Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca E. Karl for the Poly-
graph collective, London and New York: Routledge, 1996, pp. 265-272 and Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘Gen-
eral Intellect: Towards an Inquiry into Immaterial Labour’, trans. Ed Emery, (n.d.), http://www.geoci-
ties.com/CognitiveCapitalism/lazzarato2.html. For a discussion of these terms, see Tiziana Terrano-
va, ‘Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy’, Social Text 18.2 (2000): 45-46. For a de-
tailed history of the Italian autonomists, see Wright, Storming Heaven.
34 Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, London: UCL Press, 1993, p. 110.
35 See Andrew Odlyzko, ‘Content is Not King’, First Monday 6.2 (2001), http://www.firstmonday.org/is-
sues/issue6_2/odlyzko/.
36 See Boris Groys, cited in European Union, Exploitation and Development of Job Potential in the Cultural
Sector in the Age of Digitalisation, Final Report (Module 1), commissioned by European

231
organized networks

Commission/DG Employment and Social Affairs, June, 2001, p. 36. Available at:
http://europa.eu.int/comm/employment_social/empl_esf/docs/cult_sector/module1.pdf.
37 Terranova, ‘Free Labor’, p. 39.
38 Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘Immaterial Labor’, trans. Paul Colilli and Ed Emory, Radical Thought in Italy, p.
133.
39 Ibid. See also Terranova, ‘Free Labor’, pp. 41-43.
40 Lazzarato, ‘Immaterial Labor’, p. 138.
41 Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 293.
42 Ibid.
43 This contrasts with Paolo Virno’s notion of virtuosic labour in Grammar of the Multitude, where there
is ‘no end product’ (pp. 52-53).
44 Henri Lefebvre, cited in Rosemary J. Coombe, The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Ap-
propriation and the Law, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998, p. 133.
45 Scott Lash and John Urry, The End of Organized Capitalism, Cambridge: Polity, 1987.
46 See Lash and Urry, Economies of Signs and Space, p. 10.
47 Here I am drawing on Timothy Brennan’s critique of Hardt and Negri’s Empire, though Brennan is
making a comparison between immaterial labour and the multitude. As I have argued above, the
term immaterial labour is one that I see as conceptually flawed, and is better described in terms of
disorganized labour. For their part, Hardt and Negri are disappointing in their response to what they
fairly address as Brennan’s aggressive critique inasmuch as it is heavy on taking a point-by-point
refutation of Hardt and Negri’s thesis and some examples, yet offers little by way of an alternative.
See Timothy Brennan, ‘The Empire’s New Clothes’, Critical Inquiry 29.2 (2003): 337-367; Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri, ‘The Rod of the Forest Warden: A Response to Timothy Brennan (Critical
Response I)’, Critical Inquiry 29.2 (2003),
http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-crit-inq/issues/v29/v29n2.Hardt.html.
48 Brian Holmes, ‘The Flexible Personality’ (Parts 1 & 2), posting to nettime mailing list, 5 January, 2002,
http://www.nettime.org. This text and others by Holmes can be found at Université Tangente,
http://ut.yt.t0.or.at/site/total.html.
49 Justin Clemens, The Romanticism of Contemporary Theory: Institution, Aesthetics, Nihilism, Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2003, p. 174. Many of the key proponents of the creative industries, at least in Australia,
have had prior intellectual lives and academic careers studying precisely these sorts of cultural phe-
nomena.
50 Lash, Critique of Information, p. 167.
51 Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 385.
52 Michel Foucault, Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from the Outside, trans. Brian Massumi, New York:
Zone Books, 1990, p. 21.
53 Ibid., pp. 21-22.
54 Slavoj Zizek, ‘A Plea for Leninist Intolerance’, Critical Inquiry 28.2 (2002): 558.
55 Régis Debray, Media Manifestos: On the Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms, trans. Eric Rauth,
London and New York: Verso, 1996.
56 Brown et al., Politics of a Digital Present, p. v.
57 Danny Butt, ‘Re. Report: Creative Labour and the role of Intellectual Property’, posting to fibreculture
mailing list, 10 October, 2003, http://www.fibreculture.org.
58 Such a term perhaps best defines the activities of fibreculture, as discussed at the planning meeting
in Sydney, 2003. In addition to the annual fibreculture meetings, this was the first face-to-face plan-
ning meeting of fibreculture facilitators and other participants (17-18 November, 2003). For a sum-
mary of the agenda, see the posting to the fibreculture list by Esther Milne, 13 November, 2003,
http://www.fibreculture.org.
Interesting examples of union culture articulating itself in the form of organized networks can be
found at the following sites: it Workers Alliance (AU), http://itworkers-alliance.org and CyberLodge,
taking the labour movement open source (usa), http://www.cyberlodge.org/. For a brief discussion of
the emergent political consciousness among it workers – made possible, of course, by the crash in
the it sector which led to a radical change in the material and discursive conditions of programmers,

232
 notes

web designers, etcetera – see Verity Burgmann, Power, Profit and Protest: Australian Social Movements
and Globalisation, Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2003, p. 269.

Chapter 5
1 Michel Serres, Genesis, trans. Geneviève James and James Nielson, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1995, p. 96.
2 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill,
New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 16.
3 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham and London: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2002, pp. 38-39.
4 To speak of a field of new media studies is problematic in itself, since ‘there is no stable object or on-
tology around which a conceptual economy can be concentrated’. David Holmes, email correspon-
dence, 23 February, 2003.
5 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, p. 109.
6 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, pp. 1-25.
7 Gregory Bateson, ‘Form, Substance, and Difference’, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, New York: Ballan-
tine Books, 1972, p. 453. Italics in original.
8 See Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel
Bowlby, Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1991; Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic
of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford, Cal: Stanford University Press, 1994. See also D.
N. Rodowick, Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media, Durham and London: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2001, p. 20.
9 See Harold D. Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in the World War, New York: Knopf, 1927; Elihu Katz,
and Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communication,
Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1970; J. Blumler and Elihu Katz (eds), The Uses and Gratifications Approach to
Mass Communications Research. Annual Review of Communication Research, Volume 3, Beverly Hills, Cal.:
Sage, 1975; J. Fowles, Why Viewers Watch: A Reappraisal of Television’s Effects, Newbury Park: Sage,
1992. For critical appraisals of these empirical approaches, see Armand Mattelart and Michèle Matte-
lart, Theories of Communication: A Short Introduction, trans. Susan Gruenheck Taponier and James A.
Cohen, London: Sage, 1998, pp. 19-42; David Holmes, ‘Sociological Theory’, in David Holmes, Kate
Hughes and Roberta Julian, Australian Sociology: A Changing Society, Sydney: Pearson, 2003, pp. 21-87.
10 The first paradigm of Net studies consisted of a techno-utopianism associated with the ‘Californian
Ideology’, the second, unsurprisingly, of techno-dystopianism. Terry Flew provides a useful overview
of these paradigms and the emergence of the third paradigm of ‘new media empirics’. Terry Flew,
‘The ‘New Empirics’ in Internet Studies and Comparative Internet Policy’, in Hugh Brown, Geert
Lovink, Helen Merrick, Ned Rossiter, David Teh and Michele Willson (eds), Politics of a Digital Present:
An Inventory of Australian Net Culture, Criticism and Theory, Melbourne: Fibreculture Publications,
2001, pp. 105-113.
11 Admittedly I’m being very reductive about the diversity within political economy approaches. My
point is not so much one about political economy per se, as about the lack of reflexivity within new
media empirics that adopt political economy approaches. For a useful overview of political economy,
see David Hesmondhalgh, The Cultural Industries, London: Sage, 2002, pp. 27-48. For a discussion of
political economy, the Braudelian longue durée and new media, see Terry Flew, New Media: An Intro-
duction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 52-75. For interesting ethnographic empirical stud-
ies, see Elaine Lally, Materializing Culture: At Home with Computers, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2002;
Daniel Miller and Don Slater, The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach, Oxford and New York: Berg,
2000.
12 See McKenzie Wark, Virtual Geography: Living With Global Media Events, Indianapolis: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1994; Anna Munster, ‘Net Affects: Responding to Shock on Internet Time’, in Brown et
al., Politics of a Digital Present, pp. 9-17; Anna Munster, Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Informa-
tion Aesthetics, Hanover and London: University of New England Press, 2006.

233
organized networks

13 See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1993.
14 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press,
1994, p. x.
15 Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster, London: Verso, 1979, p. 36.
16 Ibid., pp. 35-36.
17 Ibid., pp. 37-38, 41. See also Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century
French Thought, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
18 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976, p. 41.
19 Ibid., p. 43.
20 David Holmes, ‘The Politics of Negative Theology’, Melbourne Journal of Politics 20 (1991): 101.
21 Althusser, Reading Capital, pp. 37-38.
22 See Raymond Williams, ‘The Technology and the Society’, in Television: Technology and Cultural Form,
London: Fontana, 1974, pp. 9-31
23 Scott Lash, Critique of Information, London: Sage, 2002, p. 17.
24 Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. & intro. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and
Michael Wutz, Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1999, p. 206.
25 Ibid., p. 203.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., pp. 203, 206.
28 Friedrich Kittler, ‘The Mechanized Philosopher’, in Laurence A. Rickels (ed.), Looking after Nietzsche,
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990, p. 198; Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, p. 184.
29 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996, pp. 376-428.
30 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 2001.
31 See Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, trans. Eva M. Knodt, Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University
Press, 2000, p. 185.
32 Ibid., p. 187.
33 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p. 6.
34 Ibid., p. 8.
35 Ibid., p. 7.
36 Ibid., pp. 16-17, 208-256. See also Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory
of Human Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boundas, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
37 Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari,
Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1992, pp. 36-37.
38 Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 8.
39 On the role of ‘formations’, see Brian Massumi, ‘Introduction: Like a Thought’, in Brian Massumi
(ed.), A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari, London and New York: Routledge, 2002,
pp. xvii-xix.
40 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p. 216.
41 Ibid., p. 152.
42 Ibid., p. 8.
43 In this relation, then, are the seeds to explore the relationship between empiricism, the imaginary
and ideology.
44 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays,
trans. Ben Brewster, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971, pp. 127-186.
45 See Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, London and New York: Verso, 1989.
46 John Frow, ‘Marxism and Structuralism’, in Marxism and Literary History, Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1986, pp. 22-23.
47 Slavoj Zizek, ‘Holding the Place’, in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek Contingency, Hege-
mony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, London and New York: Verso, 2000, p. 311.
48 See, in particular, Wark, Virtual Geography.
49 I am drawing this term from Guattari. For an outline of this concept, see Félix Guattari, ‘The Place of
the Signifier in the Institution’, trans. Gary Genosko, in The Guattari Reader, ed. Gary Genosko, Ox-

234
 notes

ford: Blackwell, 1996, pp. 148-157. Gary Genosko’s own work is enormously helpful in understanding
Guattari. See Gary Genosko, Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction, London and New York: Continu-
um, 2002.
50 Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis, Sydney:
Power Publications, 1995, pp. 24, 39, 105, 106.
51 Of course Hall is no slouch, and is the first to acknowledge – in typical reflexive fashion – the limita-
tions of the encoding/decoding model. See Stuart Hall et al., ‘Reflections upon the Encoding/Decod-
ing Model: An Interview with Stuart Hall’, in Jon Cruz and Justin Lewis (eds), Viewing, Reading, Listen-
ing: Audiences and Cultural Reception, Boulder: Westview Press, 1994, pp. 255-256.
52 Gary Genosko, email correspondence, 16 December, 2003.
53 Ibid.
54 See Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, pp. 163-199.
55 Wark’s book Dispositions, Applecross and Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2002, is one that I would con-
sider as exemplary of the sort of superempiricism I’m describing. I think Eric Michaels’ work also fits
the category and maybe even Malinowski’s diary. Certainly Serres. Enough names!
56 Genosko, email correspondence.
57 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, p. 259.
58 Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, pp. 474-475. Interesting accounts of cybernetics and computer
processing can also be read in James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Ori-
gins of the Information Society, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986; Thierry Bardin, Boot-
strapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing, Stanford, Cal.: Stanford
University Press, 2000; Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age, London: Plu-
to Press, 2004.
59 Hall stresses that his encoding/decoding paper was motivated by very local concerns: at the level of
methodology and theorization, he sought to contest the impasse of traditional uses-and-gratifica-
tions content analysis undertaken by the Centre for Mass Communications Research at the Universi-
ty of Leicester in the late 1960s, early ’70s. See Hall et al., ‘Reflections upon the Encoding/Decoding
Model’, pp. 253-256.
60 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Infomatics,
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999, p. 52.
61 Neil Chenoweth discusses the influence of games theory on Murdoch during his studies at Oxford in
the early 1950s. Neil Chenoweth, Virtual Murdoch: Reality Wars on the Information Highway, London:
Vintage, 2002, pp. 19-21.
62 Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p. 475.
63 Paul Virilio, The Art of the Motor, trans. Julie Rose, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995,
p. 125.
64 For a discussion of Maturana and Varela, see Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, pp. 131-159. An ex-
ample of a second-order feedback model applied to the development of open source content and col-
laboration with African universities can be found in Derek Keats, ‘Collaborative Development of
Open Content: A Process Model to Unlock the Potential of African Universities’, First Monday 8.2
(2003), http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue8_2/keats/index.html.
65 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 77.
66 See Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz, Jr. with Dirk Baecker, Stanford, Cal.: Stan-
ford University Press, 1995. See also Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p. 8.
67 Luhmann, Social Systems, p. 37.
68 Luhmann, Social Systems, p. 42.
69 Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition, London and
New York: Routledge, 1997, p. 141. Genosko also picks up on this point by Pearson in his discussion
of how Guattari extends the model of autopoiesis and second-order cybernetics into the realm of so-
cial relations and ‘machinic autopoiesis’. Genosko, Félix Guattari, pp. 195-200.
70 See Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p. 14.
71 Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature, London:
Flamingo , 1985, pp. 12-14. See also Isabelle Stengers, The Invention of Modern Science, trans. Daniel W.

235
organized networks

Smith, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000; Albert North Whitehead, Process and
Reality, New York: Free Press, 1978.
72 Prigogine and Stengers, Order out of Chaos, p. 71.
73 Stengers, The Invention of Modern Science, p. 72.
74 See Thomas Frank, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic
Democracy, New York: Anchor Books, 2000, p. 343.
75 As Chenoweth recounts in Virtual Murdoch, ‘The Nasdaq composite index of high-tech stocks, which
was the surest guide to the state of the tech economy, in the first three weeks of April had dropped 34
per cent down to 3200’ (p. 339). By 2001 the fall had increased to 90 per cent. See also Robert Brenner,
The Boom and the Bubble: The us in the World Economy, London and New York: Verso, 2002.
76 For a rich analysis of the Wall Street stock market crash of October 1987, see Wark, Virtual
Geography, pp. 167-228. For an idiosyncratic analysis of foreign exchange markets, traders and the
role of the computer screen, see Karin Knorr Cetina and Urs Brugger, ‘Traders’ Engagement with Mar-
kets: A Postsocial Relationship’, Theory, Culture & Society 19.5/6 (2002): 161-185. See also Brian
Holmes, ‘The Artistic Device: Or the Articulation of Collective Speech’, ephemera: theory & politics in
organization 6.4 (2006), http://www.ephemeraweb.org/.
77 Michael Goldberg, Michael catchingafallingknife.com, Artspace, Sydney, 17 October-19 November,
2002, http://www.catchingafallingknife.com. Unfortunately this site has since been taken down and
limited documentation can be found at: http://www.michael-goldberg.com. A surprising amount of
material is available through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, http://www.archive.org. See
also Michael Goldberg, ‘Catching a Falling Knife: a Study in Greed, Fear and Irrational Exuberance’,
lecture at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 20 September, 2003,
http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/aaanz03/__data/page/2974/Michael_Goldberg.doc.
78 Felix Stalder, ‘Space of Flows: Characteristics and Strategies’, posting to nettime mailing list, 26 No-
vember, 2002, http://www.nettime.org. See also Felix Stalder, Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks,
Novi Sad: kuda.org and Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Art, 2005. Available at: http://felix.open-
flows.org/pdf/Notebook_eng.pdf.
79 Felix Stalder, ‘Actor-Network-Theory and Communications Networks: Toward Convergence’, 1997,
http://felix.openflows.org/html/Network_Theory.html.
80 Geert Lovink, ‘Catching a Falling Knife: The Art of Day Trading, Interview with Michael Goldberg’,
posting to fibreculture mailing list, 16 October, 2002, http://www.fibreculture.org.
81 Lash, Critique of Information, p. 112.
82 Wulf R. Halbach, ‘Simulated Breakdowns’, in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (eds),
Materialities of Communication, trans. William Whobrey, Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press,
1994, p. 338.
83 Genosko, email correspondence.
84 Ibid.
85 Doug Henwood, Wall Street, London and New York: Verso, 1998, p. 105.
86 Edward A. Shanken, ‘Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art’, SIGGRAPH 2001
Electronic Art and Animation Catalog, New York: ACM SIGGRAPH, 2001, pp. 8-15. Also available in
Leonardo 35.4 (2002): 433-438.
87 Halbach, ‘Simulated Breakdowns’, p. 341.
88 Michael Goldberg, ‘Goldberg Consortium Transcript’, 3 November, 2002, http:// http://www.catchin-
gafallingknife.com. Since this link is dead, the report may be recoverable through the Internet
Archive, http://www.archive.org.
89 Wark, Virtual Geography, p. 189.
90 Ibid., p. 190.
91 Chenoweth, Virtual Murdoch, p. 76.
92 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p. 214.
93 Ibid., p. 8.
94 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, p. 115.
95 Serres, Genesis, p. 95.

236
 notes

96 For a particularly engaging critique of Lash’s book, see Robert Hassan, ‘Embrace Your Fate’, Continu-
um: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 17.1 (2003): 105-109.
97 Lash, Critique of Information, pp. 72-74.
98 See Lovink’s analysis of ‘swatch-time’ in ‘Net.Times, Not Swatch Time: 21st-Century Global Time
Wars’, in Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture, Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 2002, pp. 142-159.
99 Wark, Virtual Geography, p. 222.
100 Thanks to David Holmes for reminding me of this idea, among others.
101 See Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge, Mass.:
mit Press, 1999.
102 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, p. 2.
103 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Cambridge,
Mass.: Blackwell, 1990.
104 Holmes, email correspondence.
105 Paul D. Miller, Rhythm Science, Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 2004, p. 88.
106 Antonio Negri with Anne Dufourmantelle, Negri on Negri, trans. M. B. DeBevoise, London and New
York: Routledge, 2004, p. 49.
107 Ibid.

Chapter 6
1 See Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. Con-
stantin V Boundas, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. See also Gilles Deleuze and Claire
Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, Barbara Habberjam and Elliot Ross Albert, London and
New York: Continuum, 2002.
2 See Antonio Negri, ‘Public Sphere, Labour and Multitude’, trans. Arianna Bove, MakeWorld Paper 3
(2003): 4. Also available at, http://www.makeworlds.org/?q=node/view/11.
3 Antonio Negri, ‘Towards an Ontological Definition of the Multitudes’, trans. Arianna Bove, Make-
worlds Paper 4 (2004), http://www/makeworlds.org/book/view/104.
4 Briefly, I would suggest two examples that approach how I am conceiving organized networks here:
Sarai, a Delhi based media centre <http://www.sarai.net>; and Fibreculture, a network of Internet re-
search and culture in Australasia <http://www.fibreculture.org>. In their own ways, the conditions of
possibility for the emergence of these networks can be understood in terms of the constitutive out-
side. Both networks address specific problems of sociality, politics, and intellectual transdisciplinari-
ty filtered – at least in the case of fibreculture – through a void created by established institutions
within the cultural industries and higher education sector.
5 Gary Genosko, ‘Félix Guattari: Towards a Transdisciplinary Metamethodology’, Angelaki 8.1 (2003):
33.
6 Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, ‘What is the Meaning of Autonomy Today?’, republicart, September, 2003,
http://www.republicart.net/disc/realpublicspaces/berardi01_en.htm.
7 Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, trans. James Cascaito Isabella Bertoletti, and Andrea Casson,
forward by Sylvère Lotringer, New York: Semiotext(e), 2004.
8 Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, London: Verso, 2000.
9 See also Ned Rossiter, ‘Modalities of Indigenous Sovereignty, Transformations of the Nation-State,
and Intellectual Property Regimes’, Borderlands E-Journal: New Spaces in the Humanities 1.2 (2002),
http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/issues/vol1no2.html.
10 See Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, p. 24.
11 See also Andrew Kenyon and Esther Milne, ‘Images of Celebrity: Publicity, Privacy, Law’, Media &
Arts Law Review, 10.4 (2005), http://www.law.unimelb.edu.au/cmcl/malr/contents104.html.
12 Virno also recognizes the similarities between these two formations: ‘The notion of the multitude
seems to share something with liberal thought because it values individuality but, at the same time,
it distances itself from it radically because this individuality is the final product of a process of indi-
viduation which stems from the universal, the generic, the pre-individual’. A Grammar of the Multi-
tude, p. 76. I unpack the distinctions between individuality, its attendant process of individualization,
and individuation below.

237
organized networks

13 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, p. 8.
14 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, New York: Pen-
guin Press, 2004. See also Negri, ‘Towards an Ontological Definition of the Multitudes’. For an argu-
ment that identifies class as the primary antagonism and basis for intervention within informational
politics, see McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004.
15 Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, p. 52.
16 Ibid., p. 68.
17 Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, p. 103.
18 See J. Macgregor Wise, Exploring Technology and Social Space, Thousand Oaks, Cal.: Sage, 1997, p. 43;
Antonio Negri with Anne Dufourmantelle, Negri on Negri, trans. MB DeBevoise, London and New
York: Routledge, 2004, p. 124.
19 Negri, ‘Towards an Ontological Definition of the Multitudes’.
20 Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, p. 79.
21 See Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2002, pp. 1-25.
22 Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, ‘Media, Image, Dispositif’, seminar presentation, University of Technology, Syd-
ney, 9 September, 2004, and published as ‘The Image Dispositif’, trans. Marc Cote, Cultural Studies Re-
view 11.2 (2005): 64-68.
23 I am paraphrasing Bifo’s conception of the infosphere and psychosphere, based on my notes from the
seminar presentation and the abstract of the paper.
24 Michel Serres, The Birth of Physics, trans. Jack Hawkes, London: Clinamen Press, 2001.
25 This is a distinction Geert Lovink touches on in dialogue with Trebor Scholz in the newspaper for the
Free Cooperation conference that took place in Buffalo, New York in April 2004, http://freecoopera-
tion.org. See Geert Lovink and Trebor Scholz, ‘A Dialogue between Geert Lovink and Trebor Scholz’,
Free Cooperation Newspaper, 2004, p. 8. Also available at: http://freecooperation.org. Given his own
connections with the Social Science Research Council, NYC, Lovink may well be referring to a re-
sponse paper by Evan Henshaw-Plath, ‘Network Technology and Networked Organizations’, re-
sponse paper in Information Technology and International Cooperation research stream, Social Sci-
ence Research Council, New York City, 2003, http://www.ssrc.org/programs/itic/publications/knowl-
edge_report/memos/evan.pdf.
26 For an original study of the way in which the home computer has shaped domestic living, see Elaine
Lally, Materializing Culture: At Home with Computers, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2002.
27 This is the category error that so much digital architecture is prone to make. For all the rhetoric
among contemporary architectural theorists and designers to escape the modernist iron cage of ‘form
follows function’, it’s more often the case that a sad extension of this modernist logic as ‘form follows
form’ occurs under the spectral wonders of digital pixels. The work of New York and Californian ar-
chitects Greg Lynn and Marcos Novak are standout examples of this tendency.
28 The hugely influential work of people such as John Fiske and Dick Hebdige in the usa, as well as oth-
ers in the uk and Australia, has spawned countless books, essays, dissertations and postings to list-
servs that celebrate the ‘guerrilla tactics’ of subcultural practices. While I can’t substantiate the
claim, my sense over the years is that the tendency toward a valorisation of so-called everyday tactics
as oppositional politics is more pronounced within cultural studies programmes and research in the
usa than elsewhere. The concentration of publishers, number of universities, and size of the student
and academic population in the usa would be obvious starting points to a study of this phenomenon.
Someone else can do the number crunching if they really want to. For a critique of this style of cul-
tural studies, see Thomas Frank, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the
End of Economic Democracy, New York: Anchor Books, 2000.
29 It will be interesting to see the extent to which the Creative Commons licence is adopted by big busi-
ness – I’m guessing it’ll create a suitable amount of havoc, enabling service variation and consolidate
an even brighter future for the legal industry. For more information on Creative Commons – an open
source style set of standards whereby some rights of authorship and intellectual production are re-
served, see http://creativecommons.org.

238
 notes

30 Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, p. 51.

31 Ibid., p. 49-51.
32 Ibid., p. 50.
33 Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, New York: Ballantine Books, 1972.
34 See http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html.
35 Gilles Deleuze, ‘On Gilbert Simondon’, in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, trans. Michael
Taormina, ed. David Lapoujade, New York: Semiotext(e), 2004, pp. 86-89; Adrian Mackenzie, Trans-
ductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed, New York: Continuum, 2002; Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude,
p. 76.
36 See Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, p. 80.
37 Mackenzie, Transductions, p. 18.
38 See Mackenzie, Transductions. See also Andrew Murphie, ‘The World as Clock: The Network Society
and Experimental Ecologies’, Topia: A Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 11 (2004): 117-139.
39 Mackenzie, Transductions, pp. 16-19.
40 Murphie, ‘The World as Clock’, p. 120.
41 Ulrich Beck, What is Globalization?, trans. Patrick Camiller, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000, p. 8.
42 Ibid., p. 8.
43 Ibid., p. 9.
44 Ibid., p. 9-11.
45 Scott Lash, Critique of Information, London: Sage, 2002, pp. 39-48.
46 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Cambridge,
Mass.: Blackwell, 1990.
47 Lash, Critique of Information, pp. 39-40.
48 Paul D. Miller, Rhythm Science, Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 2004, p. 72.
49 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., p. 294.
50 Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, p. 81.
51 Ibid., p. 82.
52 Ibid., p. 49.
53 Deleuze, ‘On Gilbert Simondon’, p. 86.
54 A comment Bifo makes in the documentary A World to Invent (2002), by Florian Schneider. For more
information on the What is to be Done? series and related media projects, see
http://www.kein.org/projects. For a review of this series, see Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, ‘Report
on Creative Labour Workshop’, posting to fibreculture mailing list, 30 April, 2004, http://www.fi-
breculture.org.
55 Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, p. 43.
56 See Raymond Williams, ‘Communications Technologies and Social Institutions’, in Raymond
Williams (ed.), Contact: Human Communication and its History, London: Thames & Hudson, 1981, pp.
226-238.

239
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